In 2002 the "Council of the Great City Schools" and its members set out to develop performance measures that could be used to improve business operations in urban public school districts. The Council launched the "Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project" to achieve these objectives. The purposes of the project was to: (1) Establish a common set of key performance indicators (KPIs) in a range of school operations, including business services, finances, human resources, and technology; (2) Use these KPIs to benchmark and compare the performance of the nation's largest urban public school systems; and (3) Use the results to improve operational performance in urban public schools. The project's teams have used a sophisticated approach to define, collect and validate school-system data. This process calls for each KPI to have a clearly defined purpose to justify its development, and extensive documentation of the metric definitions ensuring that the expertise of the technical teams is fully captured. From the KPI definitions, the surveys are developed and tested to ensure the comparability, integrity and validity of data across school districts. "Council of the Great City Schools" is pleased to present the 2014 edition of "Managing for Results in America's Great City Schools" and continues to improve the quality of service as it relates to the "Performance Management and Benchmarking Project," which continues to provide a source of national benchmarks, and serves as an important tool for performance management. Highlights from the report include: (1) the turnaround time from initial release of surveys to the release of results has dramatically improved; (2) the launching of a new "results preview" feature that reduces the time for districts to see their own data to only about 24 hours after the data is submitted; (3) establishing a high level of stability and continuity from year to year; and (4) surveys used in the past two cycles were identical, making the data collection process more predictable for districts.