A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research may yield new insight into how districts should evaluate educational reform.

The study, conducted by Harvard researchers Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer, presents a controversial thesis, an approach to curricular reform suggesting that measures traditionally considered to be determinants of excellence in schools are in fact not correlated with educational effectiveness.

In an intensive evaluation of 35 New York City charter schools using a wide array of educational strategies, the pair discovered that standardized factors of efficacy such as class size, per-pupil expenditure, and the extent of a teacher's certification and education is not only relatively unrelated to the productivity of learning, but might even lower effectiveness.

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Dobbie and Fryer's research places suggests that efficacy of the educational system from grades three to eight sees distinguishable improvement when intensive focus is placed on teacher-student feedback, increased instructional time, tutoring, and academic and behavioral expectations.