“What you want to focus on is more of the why,” he said, “and less of a horse race to find out what works and doesn’t.”

A Carnegie spokeswoman, Mary Murrin, said in a statement that the company used “the data from all studies with varying outcomes to continuously improve our programs.”

Karen Billings, a vice president of the Software and Information Industry Association — a trade group representing many education companies — said the problem was not that companies overpromise, but that schools often do not properly deploy the products or train teachers to use them. Ms. Billings’s group helped design the field trials, in 132 schools, for the landmark 2009 government study of 10 software products, which was ordered by Congress and cost $15 million.

Then came the deflating results. The industry “became very hostile,” recalled Mr. Whitehurst, now director of education policy at the Brookings Institution. “It seems to me,” he added, “ ‘hypocrisy’ is the right word for loving something until the results are not what you expect.”

The Hard Sell

Shelly Allen, the math coordinator for public schools in Augusta, Ga., has seen a lot of curriculum salespeople pass through. She is wary of their sweet words and hard sell.

In June, when representatives from Carnegie Learning visited, Dr. Allen warned: “I just want everybody to know I grew up here. I graduated from here. My children go to school here. When you guys get back where you live, our kids have to still be able to reach goals we set.”

Augusta is famous for its magnolia-shaded National Golf Club, host to the Masters Tournament, but its public schools are typical of struggling urban districts. Three-quarters of the 32,000 students in the district, Richmond County, are black, and 72 percent are poor enough to qualify for the federal lunch program. The mean SAT math score last year was 443, below Georgia’s mean of 490 and the nation’s 516.