What makes a good public school—and how would we know it?
While these questions may appear simple to answer—given all the publicly available data and the growing number of online school-rating sites—they remain enormously difficult to resolve. Information is scattered across disconnected sources, and many rating systems are themselves poorly designed, obscuring more than they reveal.
Why measure a school’s quality? Because parents need to know whether their child will learn to read confidently; policymakers must see whether students are truly prepared for college and the workforce; and taxpayers deserve evidence that public dollars are invested well.
Can you infer the quality of a school based on standardized-test scores or judge a person’s health from their blood pressure reading? Somewhat—both types of data shed some light—but the conclusions that can be drawn are severely limited. Out of context, data like test scores fail to provide a complete and reliable measure of a school.
The good news is that states and many districts have made enormous progress on school report cards, even if those in many states like my own of Colorado, still tell us more about the demographics of the students in a particular school than what students there are learning.
Many of the existing school rating systems are strongly weighted on simple multiple-choice assessments at one point in time. That’s useful but only one piece of the puzzle and can be misleading without knowing where students started. A school with a majority of students from low-income families, for instance, often posts average standardized-test scores below a school in the same district with many well-off students, resulting in a lower rating for the first school—even when scores in the first school are rising faster. These simple rating systems can also incentivize schools to narrow a school’s curriculum, pushing aside the arts, sciences, social studies, and other critical areas of learning because they are not heavily tested.
Last, too many of our current school rating systems have been designed to identify the lowest-performing schools for accountability purposes rather than showing how the schools are doing. While accountability is important, high-stakes decisionmaking tied to punitive measures often makes it harder to understand what is really working or not—and, accordingly, harder to provide meaningful targeted support to any school wanting or needing to improve. People are inclined to not share information if they fear it will be used against them.
The moment is ripe to build evaluation systems that far better reflect how schools are serving students.
On the positive side, we have more than 50 years of research on what makes an effective school. We know the key indicators—strong leadership, clear mission, effective teaching, monitoring of student progress, safe environment with high expectations, family connections, and data-driven decisionmaking. In short, we know what to look for when evaluating school quality.
Given dramatically changing roles at the federal Department of Education and a growing likelihood that states gain even greater flexibility to define and measure their own school-quality progress, the moment is ripe to build evaluation systems that far better reflect how schools are serving students.
All of this is why my Keystone Policy Center in Colorado partnered with Georgetown University’s FutureEd on a groundbreaking new report: “Quality Check: The New, Best Way to Measure School Performance.” This report reviews the research on measuring school quality, reimagines traditional approaches to accountability, and proposes a more multidimensional system for evaluating how schools are serving their students. Importantly, the research shows that schools have a greater impact on long-term student outcomes—like college success—when they measure and work to improve not just test scores but also broader dimensions of school life, such as student engagement and school culture.
Many parts of America’s public education system are in crises. Our most vulnerable students are performing at the lowest achievement levels in more than two decades, achievement gaps are growing along income lines, teacher morale is at near-historic low levels, and investments in public education are flat lining or falling. Add to this the rapid transformations in our economy—a changing labor marketplace, new workforce demands, and the growing influence of AI in nearly every aspect of our lives—and the need becomes clear: We must do a better job of knowing how our public schools are working.
Keystone and FutureEd offer the following areas of focus for new systems of evaluation.
1. Growth in student achievement. We need to focus more on how much students are learning over time—measure the value the school adds to student learning rather than how students fit into proficiency categories at a point in time. And we need far richer assessments of what students know and can do: We can do better than simple multiple-choice tests and now have computer-adaptive assessments that explore students’ skills and knowledge more deeply.
2. Access to a rigorous, rich curriculum. We know good schools regardless of their pedagogical approaches offer a broad and deep array of courses and programs. Yes, students need math and literacy, but they also need the sciences, the arts, physical and mental health development, and history. This is critical at the secondary levels, where access to high-quality opportunities such as internships, job training, Advanced Placement courses, International Baccalaureate curricula, and other college-level courses can meaningfully prepare students for success after high school.
3. Effective staff. Research has shown that effective teachers and principals have more of an impact on student learning than any other school-based factors. It is critical to have a variety of measures for knowing how effective educators are in a school.
4. Supportive school climate. Effective schools build a culture where students feel welcomed, supported, and motivated to attend. Staff set high expectations while ensuring that every student is known and cared for. Good schools are mission-driven and intentionally build a positive environment for learning. There are a variety of tools for understanding school climate, including surveys that when well-designed can yield valid, reliable insights into a school’s culture and its impact on students.
5. Postsecondary outcomes. Schools are meant to prepare students for success in work, higher education, and life. Tracking whether students directly enter the workforce, enroll in higher education, or pursue other postsecondary pathways—and understanding how well they are doing—is a critical metric of the long-term impact of a school.
We are seeing encouraging progress, as a growing number of systems from large urban districts like Chicago to states like California and Tennessee begin to use some of these indicators. Many of them can be linked to processes like “school inspections” first developed decades ago in Britain and now used across the United States to provide expert insights that complement school report cards centered on test results.
It’s time to move beyond simplistic, test-score-driven approaches to measuring school quality and provide a fuller, more nuanced picture—one that reflects the many ways schools support student learning and development. We know what makes a school effective and we have a wide body of research on how to evaluate schools. Now, let’s apply that knowledge to create evaluation and reporting systems that guide us toward meeting our educational objectives for far more students.
