ABSTRACT
The American temperament, fundamentally more pragmatic than the British, is not disposed to place much trust in earnest, high-flown talk about ‘values’ and ‘excellence’ unless it is supported by experimental evidence. No easy-going belief that the more one puts into a system the more one gets out of it can satisfy a dollar-minded nation. Accordingly, in 1957 the New York State Education Department launched a long-term research enterprise which came to be known as the Quality Measurement Project:1 its aim, to discover effective procedures for identifying ways and means of improving the services provided by local school boards. In the State of New York, as in many others throughout the USA, the local school system is the basic administrative unit, and being to a large extent autonomous, its potential varies from community to community. Any comparison with an English LEA, therefore, should be ruled out at the start, though it seems reasonable to suppose that an investigation conducted on similar lines in this country would lead to much the same findings.
