Educators have gotten used to poring over spreadsheets filled with test scores to get a sense of their students’—and schools’—strengths and weaknesses. What they don’t often see is feedback from other teachers, administrators, and students who can offer a fresh perspective on where a school stands when it comes to instruction, resources, climate, financial efficiency, and more.
A handful of states—including, recently, Vermont—have worked to change that, using a model borrowed from other countries and known in Great Britain as “school inspections,” in which a team of experts or educators visits a school and offers objective feedback on teaching, learning, management and more.
Several states have experimented with the model for their lowest-performing schools, including Kentucky, Massachusetts, and New York, but Vermont plans to eventually conduct inspections, which it calls “integrated field reviews,” in all its schools, whether low-performing or not. The state began piloting the program last school year in about 40 schools and is continuing to test it this year in about 50, with the ultimate goal of reviewing each school every three years.
Under Vermont’s pilot, a team of 15 to 20 reviewers—among them teachers, specialists, central-office staff, officials from the state education agency, and even students—visit a particular supervisory union. Then they break up into teams of about three or four people and head out to individual schools.
Those teams will spend about half a day at a school collecting “evidence.” That can mean conducting interviews with teachers, students, and parents, and observing classes. Teams also consider supporting documents that get at how well the school is implementing the state’s education quality standards, including local tests, curriculum materials, budgets, and policies and procedures. A second team will visit the school for the second half of the day and perform a similar review.
At least for now, it’s up to local administrators and educators to decide what to do with the information.
School officials who took part in last year’s process generally say the feedback was illuminating and felt supportive—even if the prospect of reviewers coming in and judging a school made some educators nervous at first. A school can rebut anything in the formal report that leaders think is unfair or inaccurate.
Experts see plenty of potential for the reviews in the ESSA era. The new law requires states to consider multiple measures of performance, not just test scores, in evaluating school performance.
For more, see Alyson Klein’s article in Education Week: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/09/28/school-inspections-offer-a-diagnostic-look-at.html
