What Makes a Great School Truly Great?
By: Jill Zimmerman | March 1, 2012
Just before Mardi Gras, the Recovery School District (RSD) released its new annual school Equity Report. The Equity Report is one of the RSD’s commitments to New Orleans outlined last August, and the goal of the new report is to measure and make transparent the “things that make a great school truly great.”
The question of what makes a great school truly great is an important one. In a system of citywide open enrollment and school choice, parents in New Orleans must sort through a barrage of information—and misinformation—to determine which school is best for their child. Through our Spotlight on Choice research project, we are seeking to better understand the school choice system in New Orleans and how parents and students navigate and interact with that system. According to our October 2011 parent opinion poll, 86% of public school parents in New Orleans feel that information on school options is readily available. But what kind of information are parents using to identify quality public schools? What kind of information should parents use to choose their child’s school? What kind of information tells us if a great school is truly great?
There is more to a great school than high tests scores. In creating the Equity Report, the RSD acknowledged that a school’s “greatness” is demonstrated by more than just success on standardized tests, which are the primary measures used to grade schools under the state’s current accountability system. The 2012 Equity Report includes a school’s admissions rate for students with special needs, academic progress of students with special needs, student attendance rate, and the rate of students staying in school rather than being expelled, suspended, or dropping out. The report provides a more robust picture of the RSD and its schools, allowing parents and families to make better-informed decisions.
What are other ways to evaluate and measure school quality?
- The University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research has developed the “5Essentials” system to measure school quality in Chicago Public Schools. The system uses student and teacher surveys to measure schools on five core attributes: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environment, and ambitious instruction. The system was recently adopted by Excellent Schools Detroit, which is combining the 5Essentials survey with test performance and school review site visits to measure school quality in Detroit.
- The New York City Department of Education conducts annual Quality Reviews, which are two- or three-day school visits by experienced educators designed to “look behind a school’s performance statistics to ensure that the school is engaged in effective methods of accelerating student learning.” During the review, an external evaluator visits classrooms, talks with school leaders, and uses a rubric to evaluate how well the school is organized to educate its students.
- Mark Phillips, professor emeritus of secondary education at San Francisco State University, recently wrote in the Washington Post that in addition to measuring college attendance, we should conduct follow-up studies to measure college completion rates and job performance. While such studies are difficult to carry out, they would truly measure whether schools are preparing students for future success.
These are just a few of the many ways school districts and communities are thinking critically about how to measure what makes a great school truly great. Reliable and informative measures of school quality can drive school improvement and ensure that parents and families have access to valuable information about which schools are best for their children. Public schools in New Orleans continue to improve their standardized test performance, to increase their graduation rates, and to send more kids to college, but how will we know if our schools are truly great?
3 Comments
This post looks at the measurables. That’s understandable as the Cowen Institute is designed to look at these things: the quantifiables like test scores, graduation rates, college entrance rates, etc. What about the items that do not have a percentage growth?
I’d look for a school in which the opportunity to score high on the ACT/SAT is a given. There are accelerated classes or programs that can take care of this. I’d also look for the things that make school a place that a student would want to be. Classes like journalism, woodworking, theatre, etc. What is offered after school besides test prep? Are there sports besides football and basketball?
We can’t forget general safety. Random violent events such as the recent shooting in Ohio are hard to prevent. I’m more concerned with day-to-day activity. Do students respect the school’s teachers, systems, and other staff? Do the teachers feel overburdened with disciplining rather than teaching content?
Nate, You are absolutely right: most (if not all) of the factors parents consider when choosing a school can’t easily be quantified. Chicago’s 5Essentials system and NYC’s site visits are designed to try to get below the easily quantifiable through interviews and student/teacher surveys, but it is difficult to do. I wonder how families in New Orleans find the answers to questions like yours when trying to decide on a school? From our survey in October, it seems most parents rely on the recommendations of friends and family.
I am so glad Cowen is doing this research on the factors parents use to select schools for their children. At OPEN, we have adopted the Seven Correlates of Effective Schools, that emerged from the effective schools research, to determine what constitutes a good school. These research based practices/principles are broader than “the quantifiables” of which Nate references in his comment and may be more useful to parents when they visit schools to see which is a good fit for their children.
Over the past few years we have used the Correlates to see how they are applied at some of the top performing schools in the RSD and OPSB. Our film, Focus on Success, highlights four schools in the RSD and OPSB that are doing well and illustrates how the correlates are in practice at these schools. If you want to learn more about the Correlates, visit http://www.mes.org/correlates.html. Thanks for this great post!