The School Improvement Rubric (SIR)
The Dimensions and Sub-Dimensions of the School Improvement Rubric
Leadership
Organizational Leadership: the leadership system by which direction is set and deployed.
Visioning & Goal Setting: how all internal and external learning partners are inspired to work toward a shared purpose and how goals are set to define that purpose.
Performance Management: performance measurement, performance assessment, performance review and performance analysis to drive decisions and actions.
Planning
Continuous Improvement Planning: the school’s plan for continuous improvement including its quality and execution.
Team Planning: how faculty & staff work together to translate school plans into classroom strategies including coordination and integration of instruction.
Linkage to District & Classroom: how school plans support District plans and how well school plans serve to align the classroom with the district.
Student Learning
Student Achievement: teaching strategies tied to student learning standards, clear expectations for student achievement, consistent teaching strategies that ensure student learning progress, measurement and tracking of student learning outcomes and attainment of student achievement results.
Learning Support: instruction that is responsive to the needs of the learner, integration of learning support with regular education and application of applicable technologies inside and outside the classroom.
Learning Partners
Engagement of Learning Partners: knowledge of and engagement of learning partners in support of students taking responsibility for their own education and proactive involvement of the community in removal of non-academic barriers to learning.
Linkages Beyond the School: communications with all stakeholders including satisfaction determination; collaboration with governmental agencies, businesses and community organizations; and, collaboration with supplier schools and customer schools.
Human Resources Management
School Organization: implementation of site-based management, teaming structure, facility and equipment allocation, deployment of teachers and flexibility to meet student needs.
Teacher & Support Staff Development: alignment of IPDPs with building CIPs, competency and skills training, developing a team learning environment and career development.
Policies & Practices Affecting Staff: school policies and practices that address conditions of employment, teacher & support staff involvement in decisions and planning, performance evaluation and administration-union cooperation.
Curriculum & Instruction
Policies & Practices Affecting Students: school policies and practices that address attendance, discipline, homework and grading and that reinforce a culture of learning in a safe and secure environment.
Assessment: common assessment aligned with curriculum goals, appropriate methodology tied to criteria and standards and consistent interpretation of student work.
Aligned Curriculum: adherence to Academic Content Standards, suitable content expressed as learning goals, ample course and extracurricular offerings and rational sequence and organization of curricula.
Support Processes
Administrative Processes: human resource administration procedures, budgeting, reporting, contract negotiation, etc.
School Operations: scheduling, transportation and facility management (cafeteria, custodial, etc.).
Data Availability & Accessibility: the methods & means by which data is available, functionally applicable for its intended purposes, easily utilized, timely, both formative and summative, and balanced in terms of measuring process performance and measuring the extent to which the vested interests of all key stakeholders are being served.
Developed by Work in Northeast Ohio Council (WINOC) for the Ohio Department of Education’s East Regional School Improvement Team, the School Improvement Rubric (SIR) is designed for use in scoring a school’s performance level in terms of its maturity and progress toward institutionalizing improvements leading to improved student performance.
The Rubric evaluates approach, deployment and results as a continuum, using descriptors that clearly identify a school’s ‘maturity state’ across multiple ‘dimensions’ and ‘sub-dimensions’. The Dimensions and Sub-Dimensions are listed in the panel to the right. For a full description of the Dimensions and Sub-Dimensions you can download the SIR in the Download Center.
In the Baldrige reform model systematic approaches, fully deployed, beget results... hence we use a four-tier rubric.
To define maturity at each Tier we need only look at the Approach/Deployment Scoring Rubric and the Results Scoring Rubric in the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, which is captured in the chart below.
Maturity then is somewhat two-dimensional. How mature are my approaches; how mature is my deployment, and, how mature are my results? But also how mature am I at advancing from approach to deployment to results. It is the latter that the Rubric attempts to measure. It is the former that guides the kind of questions to ask to establish Tier 2 (systematic approaches), Tier 3 (fully deployed) & Tier 4 (yielding results) levels of performance excellence. [See the Question Bank below.]
The maturity states are defined as follows.
Tier 1. Status Quo – A school is not improving at all in a particular Dimension or Sub-Dimension or the dimension is not being addressed or the dimension is addressed only in an ad hoc manner.
Tier 2. Early Stages – There is a clear approach to improvement and some deployment in regard to a particular Dimension or Sub-Dimension but the approach may not be systematic or may not be integrated with school’s other systems or may not be implemented throughout the school.
Tier 3. Mature – Systematic improvement approaches are in place, integrated with the schools other systems and fully deployed throughout the school.
Tier 4. Advanced – Excellent results, including sustained favorable trends, are evident from systematic approaches and their full deployment and the school continuously improves its approaches and deployment through adoption of innovative best practices.
These Tiers, or maturity states, describe the building of improvement capacity as a journey (Status Quo, Early Stages) in which sustaining a high levels of improvement capacity is the challenge (Mature, Advanced).
The SIR is best used in a technical assistance scenario analogous to the use of the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, except in a dramatically reduced timeframe.
With Baldrige, an extensively trained external examiner team uses a seventy-page Criteria document to examine an “Application” and then conducts an onsite assessment. Subsequently the District (sometimes a school) receives a comprehensive, written Feedback Report. Acting on the Feedback Report is left to the organization being examined and follow up is based on repeating the application cycle (no more often than annually and with a different examiner team).
With the School Improvement Rubric, a Technical Assistance Team (TAT) is trained for one-and-a-half days in the use of a seven-page rubric, prepares for an onsite visit, conducts an onsite visit, scores the Rubric and develops a list of improvement opportunities and then conducts a Feedback WORKshop with the school leadership team out of which the school develops a set of improvement goals. This technical assistance scenario can be conducted in as little as five days as illustrated in the graphic below.
The Question Bank, referred to in the graphic, is an interviewing tool to assist the TAT to objectively score the Rubric and to derive potential school improvement opportunities.
The TAT subsequently conducts check ups at least every six months. The check ups are in the form of a half-day workshop with the school leadership team to assess progress and rescore themselves against the Rubric.
The design of the Question Bank, and the four-tier SIR, is predicated on the Baldrige improvement model that systematic approaches, fully deployed will yield performance improvement results. This is illustrated below.
The four-tier SIR is predicated on the Baldrige improvement model that systematic approaches, fully deployed will yield performance improvement results. This is illustrated to the right.
Thus another way to think about the four tiers is as follows:
Tier 1 = the lack of systematic approaches.
Tier 2 = systematic approaches but not fully deployed.
Tier 3 = systematic approaches, fully deployed, but results not present (yet) or not reported.
Tier 4 = systematic approaches, fully deployed and yielding results.
Therefore, the efficient interview-based way to ascertain where a school is at on the Rubric is to first investigate whether or not systematic approaches are in place; second, investigate deployment; and, third, investigate results and/or ask for evidence. And that is how the Question Bank is structured.
While it is true that partial approaches can be fully deployed, or even that good results can occur in the absence of fully-deployed systematic approaches, the interviewing method based on the SIR Question Bank seeks to establish a school’s maturity at each Tier sequentially... are there adequate approaches in place, are they being deployed throughout the school where applicable, and are they yielding results? This iz`s illustrated below.
Deriving Improvement Opportunities: One of the advantages of using the Question Bank, given its design/structure, is that it can assist a Technical Assistance Team (TAT) to develop suggested opportunities for improvement for the school leadership team to address (through its CIP/SIP process, for example).
Simply put, if there is a negative response to a question in the question bank then an improvement opportunity is to work on getting a positive response.
Take for example the question “How are performance expectations communicated to staff, students, parents and other key stakeholders?” If the answer is that this is done informally or in an ad hoc manner then a potential improvement opportunity may be to “develop a more systematic way to communicate performance expectations to staff, students, parents and other key stakeholders.”
[Conversely, the last question in a string of questions that is answered positively points to a potential strength of the school.]
