Creating Performance Goals and Measures for Your Charter School Essay

This document is designed to endure guidance and assistance in developing reasoning(a) goals and measures both learningal and organizational for inclusion in your charter agreement with Authorizing Agency. The following guidance focuses oddly on providing deeper guidance for developing strong educational goals and measures i.e., those that will comprise the faculty member and Student Non-Academic military operation indicators of your charter agreement. This task demands particular attention because educational surgical operation indicators argon often more ambitious to state in substantive, objective terms than ar non-educational measures, such as those focusing on organizational and Management Performance (the third category of death penalty indicators required for your charter agreement).However, the principles for developing all of these types of goals and measures argon very similar thus, to the extent applicable, you should follow the guidance in these pages for d eveloping your non-educational goals and measures as well. I. General Criteria for Goals Goals should be SMARTSpecific and Tied to Standards Measurable Ambitious and Attainable reflective of Your Mission Time-Specific with Target accompaniment1. Specific A well-defined goal must be specific, clearly and concisely stated, and easily understood. Academic goals should be buttoned to academic standards that specify what students should This document was first developed by Margaret Lin as a guidance tool for the Charter civilises Office of Ball State University (IN) to offer to the conditions it oversees. It has been fit for distribution at the Annual Conference of the National Association of Charter discipline Authorizers, Nov. 13-14, 2003, San Diego, CA. Many of the concepts, definitions and principles in these pages are adapted from the following sources Measuring Up How Chicagos Charter Schools Make Their Missions Count, by Margaret Lin (Leadership for Quality Education, 2001) Guidelines for indite Charter School obligation Plans, 2001-2002 (Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York), http//www.newyorkcharters.org/charterny/act_ cast.html and Some Expectations Regarding the Contents of Charter School Accountability Plans, District of Columbia Public Charter School Board. hump and be able to do, for individually present or content area and for each grade, age, or other grouping take. Equally important, academic goals should be developed with solid intimacy of students baseline act levels.2. Measurable A goal should be tied to measurable results to be achieved. Measurement is then simply an judgement of success or failure in achieving the goal. 3. Ambitious and Attainable A goal should be challenging yet attainable and realistic. Academic goals should be base on a well-informed sound judgement of your shallows capacities and your students baseline achievement levels. 4. Reflective of Your Mission A goal should be a natural outgro wth of your school mission, reflecting the schools values and aspirations. 5. Time-Specific with Target Date A well-conceived goal should specify a clip frame or target date for achievement. Ball State expects its charter schools to specify both long-term goals that each school expects to achieve by the end of its fourth year of operation, along with annual benchmarks that will enable the school, authorizer and other stakeholders to monitor and assess the pace of progress.Definitions of Key Terms To develop adequate study goals and measures, schools should startle with a clear understanding of a few essential terms Goal A clear, measurable record of what students will know and be able to do in order to be considered meliorate after a authoritative length of time attending the school. Standard A clear, measurable statement of what students will be expected to know (a content standard) or be able to do (a operation or skill standard) at a tending(p) touch in their developmen t, usually each year and at graduation. (Standards are usually defined grade-by-grade and subject-by-subject, and are thus more specific than but incumbent to support overarching school goals.)Assessment (sometimes also measure) A method, tool or system to measure and abut student progress toward or mastery of a particular learning standard or goal. (Examples A exchangeable test, or a portfolio-judging system) Measure An application of an assessment that defines progress toward or progression of a goal and indicates the level of transactance that will constitute success.(Example Students at the Successful Charter School will improve their performance on the reading portion of the Stanford-9 by at least 3% per year, on average.) Assessments and by extension, measures should be valid, reliable, and demonstrate scoring consistency Valid Assesses the skill or knowledge it is intended to assess. Reliable Provides consistent results when taken repeatedly by the student at a g iven point in his/her development, as well as by other students at the same point in development. Scoring Consistency Produces consistent nocks, ratings, results or responses when a particular assessment tool, scoring guide or rubric is employ by different evaluators to assess the same student performance or work sample.3II. Essential Principles to Guide the Development of Sound educational Goals and Measures Your mandate as the manipulator of a charter school is not just to teach well but also to demonstrate objectively in ways that are clear, understandable and credible to a variety of external audiences that you are doing so. Thus, you must measure and report academic progress precisely and extensively. Distinguish between goals and measures. Goals are the beginning point, but require valid, reliable ways to measure and demonstrate that you make achieved them. Make sure that your goals are clear, specific and measurable. Your measures for attainment of those goals should describe how you will assess progress, and how much progress will constitute success. Educational goals must be connected to a well-defined set of learning standards for both content (what students should know) and performance (what students should be able to do).Such standards should exist for every(prenominal) subject or content area and each grade, age or other grouping level in the school. Focus on outcomes and evidence of learning, not inputs. For example, participation rates or the number of hours spent on an activity are not fitted measures of success. Participation and investment of time arenecessary first steps, but they are inputs, not measures of learning and accomplishment. In developing goals for your accountability plan, focus on whats most important.Ten or less clear, well-chosen and carefully measured educational goals (for both Academic and Student Non-Academic Performance) should allow you to provide a convincing story of your progress and achievements and wil l be more effective than listing a score of vague, trivial, redundant or hard-to-measure indicators. The measures you develop to assess achievement of each goal, if not based on standardized assessments, should be demonstrably valid and reliable. (The attached framework will provide some help in developing stiffness and reliability of assessments.)A Note on Defining Standards Milestones on the Path to Broader School Goals Educational goals must be tied to clear content and performance standards specifying what you expect your students to know and be able to do in order to graduate or be promoted to the next level. These standards need unaccompanied to be referenced in your accountability plan, but they form the foundation of your schools education program. As such, selecting and developing grade-bygrade, subject-by-subject standards is an essential component of accountability planning that goes hand-in-hand with broader goal-setting. Of course, many of your school standards will b e Indiana state standards.However, most schools befuddle important aims beyond the state requirements, and developing these supplemental standards is a technically challenging task. It usually consists of several steps, including 1. Articulating desired characteristics of educated students at a general level or setting yourschools overarching goals 2. Breaking these general qualities and goals into more concrete graduation or exit standards and 3. Benchmarking these exit standards down into specific and measurable grade-age-level content and performance standards.2III. Practical Steps for create Sound Educational Goals and Measures Define a set of goals that describe what success will look akin at your school. These goals should be carefully selected to reflect the breadth and depth of your mission, and should answer critical questions such as How will you know if your school is succeeding (or not)? What will be important characteristics of educated students at your school? Wha t will students know and be able to do after a certain period of time? Outline your goals in precise, declarative sentences.Example All students at the Excelencia Charter School will be proficient readers and writers of Spanish within four years of enrolling. Identify at least one and mayhap multiple measures to assess and demonstrate progress toward each goal. These measures must indicate both (1) the level of performance you will expect your school or students to achieve, and (2) how much progress will indicate success. (It is not fitted to say youll administer a certain type of assessment you must explain how you expect your students to perform on it to demonstrate progress and success.)Adapted from Accountability for Student Performance An Annotated Resource Guide for do an Accountability Plan for Your Charter School (Charter Friends National Network, 2nd ed., 2001), p. 5, http//www.charterfriends.org/accountability.doc.You may develop different types of measures to assess (1) absolute achievement (2) student growth or gains or (3) achievement compared to other schools. (The box under provides an example of different ways to measure achievement of the same goal.) For every goal, choose means of assessment that make non-attainment of the goal as objectively apparent as success. That is, the assessment(s) should tell you (and external audiences) immediately whether you aim achieved a particular goal or not. Make sure that your measures of student learning are based on knowledge of your students baseline achievement levels. Without such knowledge, your measures will not be meaningful or realistic. Set long-term goals as well as intermediate (typically annual) benchmarks to assess progress.Administer assessments corresponding to this timeline to provide longitudinal data over the term of the charter. To have time to counter learning deficits that students may have upon entering your school, you may consider setting certain goals for students who have been enrolled in your school for a certain period of time, such as students who have been in the school for at least collar years. For every measure you develop, ask yourself, Will this measure be readily understandable and credible to someone who doesnt spend a day or a week in our school getting to know us?Remember, your school will be judged by the media, community leaders and the public at large, in addition to your authorizer and parents. For measures not based on standardized tests, establishing external credibility typically requires demonstrating validity and reliability. (The attached framework offers an overview of one way for schools to do this.) Understand what data you will need to fill to support each measure. Remember, if you have no data, you have no case proving your schools achievements. Likewise, if you have insufficient data, you have an insufficient case.There is no single best way to measure achievement of a particular goal. As charter schools, you are free to cho ose measures that you prefer, provided that they are also meaningful and persuasive to external audiences. The following example shows how three different measures might be applied to a single learning goal. (These goals could be developed by one school or by three different schools that have the same goal.) Note that each measure describes how progress will be assessed and how much progress will constitute success. The third measure allows the school to assess skills beyond those measured on standardized tests, and would thus require some demonstration of validity and reliability or be used in addition to externally validated assessments.