School Performance Frameworks
Lessons, Cases, and Purposeful Design
In a growing number of communities, school performance frameworks (SPFs) are central to answering these questions:
How do school district leaders define school quality and drive systemic improvement?
How do principals drive continuous improvement in their schools?
How do families understand how their school is doing or choose a new school for their child?
SPFs, sometimes called school report cards, are action-oriented tools that provide information on school performance and quality using a variety of measures.
This website aims to help district leaders, board members, and other school system leaders learn about what SPFs are and who uses them, discover lessons from five cities that have implemented SPFs over a multiyear time span, and create an effective and durable SPF.
How to Use an SPF
SPFs often aim to communicate information about schools to multiple stakeholders with different goals and purposes for using the information. But because different audiences and SPF users have varied needs, challenges can arise. For example, the information families want to know about their child’s school is not always the same information that district leaders need to drive improvement and make decisions across multiple schools.
Resolving these conflicts requires careful design, implementation, and communication to ensure an SPF is reliable, valuable, and trusted by those who use it. We have identified three primary use cases for SPFs – a concept borrowed from the world of technology and design. If system leaders understand and clearly prioritize intended uses for their SPF, the results will be more useful, more effective, and longer lasting.
Click on the labels below to learn more about the three primary use cases for SPFs and how they can shape SPF design:
Leaders at a district or system level use the SPF to define school performance, track progress, and inform decisions such as school improvement, interventions, expansion, opening, or closure.
Principals use the SPF to understand how their school is performing, identify key strengths and weaknesses, and inform school strategy and management decisions.
Families and community members use the SPF to inform the choice of where to send their child to school, and/or understand how their school is performing and engage with school and district leaders.
Read More About SPFs
This website is based on a more detailed report, “School Performance Frameworks: Lessons, Cases, and Purposeful Design.”
Building a Continuously Improving System of Schools
Many communities that create SPFs do so as part of larger improvement strategies. All five of the SPFs highlighted in this report are also featured in Bellwether's 2018 report "Eight Cities." This site tells the story of urban school systems that have seen student outcomes improve at a faster pace than other cities.