Committed to making data about school performance and improvement accessible to all, the University at Albany's School of Education in 2004 joined with other agencies and associations to launch Just for the Kids-NY. Since that time the project has pursued three main goals:

1. Offering a Website that enables users to learn how any school in the state is doing on State Assessments and compare that performance with similar schools using a variety of interactive and easy-to-understand charts and graphs.
2. Learning what higher-performing schools do that distinguishes them from their average-performing peers and making that information available both on the Web and in high quality print resources.
3. Developing tools to support schools wanting to adopt the best practices of the higher-performing schools.

In 2009 the Just for the Kids-NY launched Know Your Schools~for NY Kids so as to better achieve all three goals. As of the summer of 2009, in addition to upgrading the school comparison feature of the Website, the project had completed studies and issued reports detailing best practices in higher-performing schools at the elementary, middle, and high school level as well as in middle school science.