In this vital book, the famed filmmaker tells how his passion for education reform led him to learn that there are five tested, indispensable keys to transforming America's underperforming schools. Famed director M. Night Shyamalan has long had a serious interest in education. The founda­tion he and his wife started once gave college scholarships to promising inner-city students, but Shyamalan realized that these scholarships did nothing to improve education for all the other students in under-performing schools. When he learned that some schools were succeeding with similar student populations, he traveled across the country to find out how they did this and whether these schools had something in common. He eventually learned that there are five keys to closing America's achievement gap. But just as we must do several things to maintain good health? eat the right foods, exercise regularly, get a good night's sleep?so too must we use all five keys to turn around our lowest-performing schools. These five keys are used by all the schools that are succeeding, and no schools are succeeding without them. Before he discovered them, Shyamalan investigated some popular reform ideas that proved to be dead ends, such as smaller class size,