Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, schools, districts, states, and the federal government devoted enormous resources to the implementation of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models. With more than 1.6 billion federal dollars distributed through the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) project and its successor, the CSR project, states and districts made CSR adoption a central reform strategy for their lowest performing schools. Today, however, federal funding for CSR has dried up, and this policy has been left behind with few explicit efforts to assess the effect of these CSR funds on schools. In this article, the authors look back on this federal reform initiative and the effect it had on Texas students. Using promising analytic techniques for nonexperimental studies to investigate the effects of federal CSR awards on student achievement, the authors find that CSRD funding did not significantly effect students’ reading performance and that its effect on math performance varied across different student types.

Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,800 nationally, serving nearly three million students.