When choosing a school, the first thing that anyone wants to know is whether or not it provides students with an effective learning environment. By looking at results such as state test scores, student performance, retention and graduation rates, you can get a fairly clear picture of how well a school is doing its job.esearch carried out by David Miller Sadker and Karen R. Zittleman for McGraw-Hill Higher Education identified a common set of characteristics that effective schools seemed to share. This now often referred to as the five factor theory.