What’s the Best Way to Measure a School’s Quality? 5 Factors to Consider

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What’s the best way to measure a school’s quality? It depends on whom you ask. Parents, educators, employers and policymakers hold many different opinions about the goals of education and, therefore, about how to judge school performance.

Yet virtually every educational aim rests on the same foundation: giving students a strong academic grounding and developing the knowledge and habits of mind that allow them to think critically, communicate effectively and acquire knowledge and skills over time.

At this challenging moment in American education, with student achievement in decline, FutureEd and the Keystone Policy Center decided to approach the question of how best to measure schools from scratch. We combed the research about the features of schools that make the greatest contribution to academic achievement and identified five research-based characteristics that together provide a more complete and precise picture of school quality than is typically available. 

All the measures can support school improvement and provide parents and the public with a fuller understanding of school performance. But not all are suitable for high-stakes accountability decisions. Some metrics lack the reliability, validity and comparability necessary for ranking schools, replacing their staff or closing them.

1. Growth in Student Achievement

For decades, accountability systems judged schools based primarily on state test scores. But these correlate strongly with demographics and family income, making it difficult to gauge the real contributions of schools to improved student outcomes. A fairer, and increasingly popular, way to judge schools also considers how much they contribute to growth in students’ test scores over the year.

2. Access to Rigorous Instruction

To achieve at high levels, students need access to challenging coursework. Policymakers can address this in accountability systems by measuring whether schools offer access to a broad range of course offerings, including the arts, sciences and technology, so schools don’t narrow their focus to just reading and math. To help teachers deliver strong instruction, research increasingly points to the importance of using high-quality, standards-aligned instructional materials, which many states and districts are starting to emphasize. Research also has found that completion of one or more advanced math and science classes in high school predicts both college readiness and later health, job satisfaction and well-being. This can be measured by the availability of and enrollment in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and dual-enrollment programs, for example, but only if they are made accessible to students who may have been shut out in the past. 

Student surveys also provide insight into whether schools provide a learning environment that promotes high achievement. But any use of surveys should include safeguards against adults influencing responses, and states must ensure they are valid and reliable. That’s why many states and districts use surveys for school improvement rather than accountability.

Accountability systems also could include reviews of student work, with a focus on instructional rigor, though doing so requires systematically collecting and evaluating work samples across schools.

3. Effective Staff

Research consistently shows that teacher and principal quality contribute more to student achievement than any other school-based factors. Traditionally, teacher quality has been measured by years of experience and subject-specific expertise, such as degrees earned or passing of teacher-licensure exams. But these measures often don’t correlate with student achievement. A sounder strategy would be to identify the percentages of effective or highly effective teachers in a school through teacher evaluation systems that use multiple measures of quality and classroom observation, though few states have such systems at scale. 

States and districts can measure a principal’s impact on student success using multiple measures and several years’ worth of achievement data. Educator surveys of principal-teacher and teacher-to-teacher trust; principals’ instructional leadership; and teachers’ commitment to their school also provide an important window into a school’s overall professional capacity. To prevent pressure from influencing survey results, states and districts should limit such measures to school improvement.

4. Supportive Climate

Many states include chronic student absenteeism in their accountability systems as a proxy for student engagement and whether a school’s climate is safe and conducive to learning. It is a reasonable strategy. But well-designed and well-implemented student, teacher and educator surveys — again, with sufficient validity and reliability safeguards — can provide more direct measures of school culture. Such surveys also can provide key insights into where improvement is needed.

5. Postsecondary Outcomes

Test scores are proxies for long-term measures that parents value. But metrics such as whether students attend and graduate from college or career-training programs, enroll in the military, find gainful employment, and lead healthy and fulfilling lives are better gauges of readiness for adulthood. Though few states measure outcomes such as college enrollment when evaluating schools, better connecting pre-K-12 data systems to postsecondary and labor market data could help monitor a range of important post-high-school outcomes. 

Many high-performing countries use inspection systems that combine test scores and other quantitative measures with classroom observations and interviews conducted by teams of trained experts who visit schools to gather information on important features of success. These reviews typically include a school self-assessment followed by team site visits. They result in a comprehensive report describing a school’s strengths and weaknesses and recommended steps for improvement. While such inspection systems have spread rapidly around the world, the cost and logistics of conducting valid and reliable school site reviews at scale has slowed their adoption in the U.S., particularly for high-stakes accountability decisions.

Test scores matter. But by themselves, they provide an incomplete measure of school success. They also offer little guidance or support on how schools can improve. A more comprehensive set of research-based metrics would provide parents, educators and policymakers with a richer understanding of what makes schools successful and a clearer sense of how to strengthen them. Measurement systems that combine standardized test scores, access to rigorous and advanced coursework, prevalence of effective teachers and school leaders, evaluations of respectful and supportive school cultures and data on student success after high school are most likely to promote higher student achievement. Responsibility for weighting each strand and the specific metrics within them should rest with state and local education officials. But each component should play a role in evaluating school success.

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