Families and communities need access to reliable, understandable information about school quality to make decisions for their students. One tool district leaders can use to provide this information is a school performance framework (SPF). But SPFs are only useful to families if they are designed with families in mind. If leaders treat the needs of families as an afterthought during the design phase, it should be no surprise when families don’t use the tool.
In our recent project at SchoolPerformanceFrameworks.org, my co-authors and I identified family and community information as one of three primary “use cases” that could shape SPF design decisions. My colleague Bonnie O’Keefe explains the concept of use cases and offers another example — school continuous improvement — here.
An SPF designed to show families and communities how schools are performing should include:
- Early, authentic, and ongoing engagement of families and community members in the design process: District leaders should involve families from the beginning to understand what information they need or may already have. This can be accomplished through task forces, roundtables, or listening sessions, or by administering parent surveys. Leaders should be cautious not to engage only the most visible stakeholders, but instead should use various methods to engage families that will be most impacted by the SPF. Inauthentic engagement risks alienating key stakeholders and reinforcing harmful power dynamics.
- The information families and community members most want to know: Families typically prefer a higher level of detail, a focus on outcomes, and a summative rating, because they are easier to understand. This contrasts significantly from the granular level of detail school leaders might need. If leaders create a tool that primarily serves families, the SPF might be less useful to school leaders or system leaders.
- Results displayed in an understandable and accessible way: One reason families may struggle to understand school performance frameworks is when they are full of jargon. For example, parent advocacy organization Learning Heroes has found that someone could misread the phrase “School Climate” on a school report card to mean building temperature as opposed to the quality of school life. District leaders should present data to families that is free of jargon and available in high-quality multilingual translations.
Many of the districts profiled in our report have made improvements to their SPF over the years to make them more accessible to parents. For example, the School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP) in Chicago was not originally designed with families in mind, but the growth of school choice options prompted the district to make changes to give families access to more transparent, shared information across schools. SQRP reports now include the size of the school, the names and contact information for school leaders, programmatic offerings, and information about transportation options to each school. Reports are available in multiple languages and families can easily find the definitions of key terms within one click.
To learn more about other use cases for SPF design, and other long-standing local SPFs, visit SchoolPerformanceFrameworks.org.