Maintaining high expectations and identifying high-quality charter schools is essential for strong growth in the charter school sector. How, though, is school quality assessed? We reviewed 25 school quality rating systems for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools to identify emerging trends in school quality evaluation in a recent report, Quality School Ratings: Trends in Evaluating School Academic Quality. The report looks at rating systems from state departments of education, large public school districts, charter associations and authorizers, and private news and advocacy organizations. Trends we found among the systems included:
the inclusion of student growth, useful for evaluating a school’s quality based on its students’ progress—a new standard for quality rating systems;
the expansion of college- and career-readiness measures—going beyond graduation rates to include important, new indicators; and
new ways to focus attention on the lowest-performing students—as we say in the report, “great schools are great for all students in the building.”
As the trends indicate, states and schools have made progress in their efforts to establish more meaningful measures of school quality, and we foresee a stronger system for evaluating quality across states following the adoption of Common Core-aligned assessments. In addition to identifying new measures of academic quality, the report also highlights useful approaches to creating effective rating systems, such as:
the use of multiple measures to evaluate school quality;
simplified reporting formats to categorize school quality; and
an increase in data transparency and public accessibility—so that a rating system can be judged not just by its accuracy, but by how available its data are to users.
Shining a light on meaningful and accessible performance indicators is crucial for public accountability, and will help families make better decisions for their children. Lyria Boast is a senior consultant and Tim Field is a senior policy fellow at Public Impact, a non-profit focused on helping education leaders and policymakers improve student learning in K-12 education
