| A Comprehensive System for the Evaluation of Schools |
William
J.Webster |
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| A Comprehensive System for the Evaluation of Schools |
William
J.Webster |
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SUMMARY
This paper has described a three tier accountability system. District goals and desired outcomes are established through a Districtwide planning process and operationalized through the District Improvement Plan. Each school's role in helping the District to meet its goals is determined through a School Community Council which ensures involvement at the local campus level. Accountability is operationalized in a criterion-referenced manner through an analysis of absolute outcomes relative to school and District performance on goals specified in the District Improvement Plan and the School Improvement Plans, and in a norm-referenced manner through school effectiveness indices. Goals in the School Improvement Plans are determined based on the District’s most effective schools and their staffs.
Besides providing an objective procedure for identifying effective schools, the program has a number of practical advantages. First, and most important, it is designed to foster teamwork among school staffs within schools. In order to achieve the necessary improvements in student outcomes, school staffs must work together in a coordinated effort. The program does not reward individual competition among teachers within schools.
Second, the program focuses attention on the important outcomes of schooling. The Accountability Task Force, as well as many other groups associated with the schools, are discussing what it is that the schools are about. The process of weighting the outcome variables, a procedure that is done annually, gives many divergent groups the opportunity to share their views relative to the purposes and importance of schooling. While the accountability system alone will not improve instruction, the curriculum and instructional delivery processes that must be changed to impact the defined outcomes will.
Third, the procedures described afford all schools an opportunity to be distinguished as an effective school independently of their student populations status on the achievement continuum. The emphasis is on effectiveness with the students who come in the door, not absolute outcome levels. The techniques reward those schools that impact the most students the most positively (Webster, et.al.,1997).
Many District and State accountability systems include District and School Improvement Plans that encompass absolute goals. The addition of effectiveness indices makes the accountability system valid and fair. Among the advantages of this type of approach are that each school's performance is not judged by simple examination of raw outcome variables, but instead by comparing its student outcome levels with empirically determined expectations based on individual student histories; that schools derive no particular advantages by starting with high-scoring or low scoring students of any particular ethnic or economic group; that schools are only held accountable for the outcome levels of continuously enrolled students, that is students who have been exposed to their instructional program; that adequate time for test make-up is allowed and schools must test 95% of their eligible students; and, a Task Force representing all of the important groups that have a stake in schooling determines the important outcomes of schooling and their respective weights in the equations.
In summary, the school evaluation model discussed in this paper has a number of elements that are important to ensuring utility, feasibility, propriety, and accuracy of results. These elements include:
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