Introduction to School Performance Frameworks

SPFs are action-oriented tools that provide information on school performance and quality across a variety of measures. SPFs are intended to provide meaningful, comparable, and understandable measures of school quality and to support informed actions from key stakeholders, which can include educators, leaders, and community members. SPFs are sometimes referred to as school report cards or rating systems.

Introduction to SPFs
Use Cases: System Management and Accountability; School Continuous Improvement; Family and Community Information
Combining Use Cases

SPFs are intended as a tool to support decision-making and action aimed at ensuring high-quality schools for every student. A well-designed SPF can support various strategies to improve schools and can increase transparency about school performance.

And SPFs are often one piece of a broader strategy for school improvement.

In our recent publication, EightCities.org, Bellwether Education Partners identifies strategic pillars district leaders can use to drive change in their districts. Establishing an SPF is often one of the first steps in a systemic improvement plan, because the process requires a school system to define school quality and long-term goals with community input. The SPF then becomes the tool assessing progress toward goals and the foundation for communicating information about school performance.

Any SPF requires some key building blocks, like reliable, comparable data; resources and capacity to create and implement the SPF; and strong communication and engagement plans. But SPFs vary greatly in design and the actions they support. For example, some SPFs include a summative rating or score of school performance, such as a letter grade or tier; others present an array of data as a “dashboard” but with no single, summative rating. Ultimately, these design choices are dependent upon the goals and the users whom leaders hope to serve with an SPF.

“SPFs are intended as a tool to support decision-making and action aimed at ensuring high-quality schools for every student. ”

The History of SPFs

SPFs are new in many places but well established in others. Many local SPFs today originally evolved as a local supplement or alternative to school ratings required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2001). The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) replaced NCLB and required revisions to state report cards, and a wider range of metrics than what was required under NCLB. At the same time, a growing school choice movement and increased adoption of autonomous school governance structures mean that more communities want clear standards for local accountability and information about school performance. Without an SPF, school quality tends to be defined by word-of-mouth, high-level test scores, and/or measures like neighborhood income. An SPF provides an opportunity for local communities to define what matters most to them in school performance.

Use Cases

Different people and communities use SPFs for different purposes. We have identified three primary purposes for which SPFs are currently used and designed, called “use cases,” a concept borrowed from the world of technology and design. Determining which use case or use cases an SPF will support is a critical first step in the design process. Communities considering an SPF or revising an existing SPF should think through how they envision the SPF being used, and how they might prioritize different uses.

The three use cases are:

System Management and Accountability

System leaders, such as superintendents and district leadership teams, school board members, or charter school authorizers, might use an SPF to support clear, consistent decisions around school management or systemwide strategies. System leaders can use an SPF to identify schools in need of intensive support; identify and reward high-performing schools; inform decisions around school expansion, replication, and/or closure; design systemwide improvement strategies; and allocate resources appropriately and equitably across schools.

SPFs designed for system management and accountability need:

1. Comparable, reliable, and equitable results across schools;

2. Alignment with systemwide goals and plans for student achievement;

3. Clear policies and processes defining the role of the SPF in important system management decisions.

School Continuous Improvement

School leaders might use an SPF to inform and support school-level continuous improvement in operations, culture, and student outcomes. SPFs can help school leaders understand how schools are performing against district/system expectations and goals; diagnose key strengths and weaknesses across a variety of outcomes; flag leading indicators of potential problems for early action; and guide school resource allocations, staffing plans, and programmatic decision-making.

SPFs designed for school continuous improvement need:

1. Relevant, frequently available data to support school leader decision-making;

2. A mix of student outcomes metrics and other indicators that can help diagnose difficulties or serve as leading indicators of improvement;

3. A training and support plan for school leaders to incorporate results into their improvement plans and processes.

Family and Community Information

Families and community members deserve transparent, clear information about school performance. Families can use results from the SPF to help contextualize their student’s performance, inform school choice decisions, and advocate effectively for improvement in their school or district. More broadly, community members can use the data from an SPF to help inform and advocate for community priorities, choose elected leaders, and engage with the school system.

SPFs designed for family and community information need:

1. Multiple ways to access, use, and understand SPF results and what goes into them;

2. Clear, jargon-free indications of what a metric or rating means;

3. Information that matters to families beyond student outcomes (e.g., programs and amenities at the school, family and student experience).

Combining Use Cases

It is unlikely that any SPF would be able to completely meet the needs of system leaders, school leaders, and family/community members simultaneously. Trying to “do it all” might result in an SPF that meets no one’s needs. Across the five SPFs we profiled, a lack of clearly defined purposes and priorities could undermine an SPF’s effectiveness and, ultimately, its credibility with stakeholders.

Of the three use cases, school continuous improvement may be the toughest to combine with others, because school leaders need a depth, frequency, and variety of data to make school-level decisions that could overwhelm other users.

Rather than aiming to do everything at once, leaders interested in an SPF should clearly understand their goals, and map out and assess other systems currently serving the needs of each user group — for instance, existing data systems for school leaders, or resources for families choosing a school. Then, leaders should prioritize the use cases the SPF will serve and in what order. Design choices, including everything from the indicators the SPF measures to presentation of data and results, should be made with that prioritization in mind. Where trade-offs are required between options that serve one purpose better than another, those priorities then serve as a framework for decisions.

If an SPF will serve more than one use case, it is important to anchor it in common, coherent goals for students, with different presentations for different users. A single PDF report will not serve multiple user groups well. The most successful SPFs present specialized options for different audiences to view and understand results.

Regardless of which purposes an SPF serves, they are intended to drive action — not be solely informational. If an SPF is meant to support school choice, families will also need a well-functioning enrollment system and one-on-one support in order to understand their choices. If school leaders are meant to use an SPF in improvement, they will need coaching and professional development to use information effectively in their day-to-day and long-term strategies.

Next, use the links below to explore examples of SPFs in different cities, and examine how they align to each use case.

Examine local SPFs