Identifying Your School Health Metrics
The school year is well under way: students are back in classrooms, teachers are delivering lesson plans and administrators are making sure everyone is off to a strong start. A little over a month into the new year, you may be wondering how you can tell if everything is on track. But where do you even look? How will you know that all continues to go well?
This is where the building blocks of school health come in: safety, engagement, attendance and academic performance. These are the foundational categories of what you need to measure in order to determine how healthy your school currently is. Listed below is not a definitive list of data points but rather suggestions to help guide your thinking in the right direction as you decide on which combination of metrics your school’s data team should be monitoring. By being thoughtful now in selecting these data points, you can set your school up to have its most successful year yet.
Block #1: Safety
We all know this, but in the wildness of the school year, we tend to forget that our primary duty to students is to their safety - both physical and emotional. Without safety, we cannot learn, teach, or function. Prioritizing this element of school health by proactively monitoring some of the following metrics is one important step in keeping your school a place where children and adults feel secure.
Student Surveys - We recommend sending out a student survey at the beginning of the school year to take the pulse on how supported they feel and generally how they are experiencing school. Does every student have at least one adult to whom they can go with concerns? How do they feel in their classrooms and in your school’s hallways? Asking students themselves – particularly if you are serving middle- and high-school populations – is one way of taking the guesswork out of determining levels of safety.
Percentage of Adults in Building with Safety Training Completed - A very basic metric but one that is easy to overlook. It is, unfortunately, also a data point that makes itself painfully clear in times of crisis. Checking in on this number early and often in the school year will ensure that all adults in the building will know what to do when disaster strikes. How many adults in the building are CPR certified? Has everyone completed basic crisis management training? What about sexual assault and harassment? You won’t know until you hunt these numbers down intentionally.
Number of Reports of Incidents and Behavior Management - We want to stress the importance of taking these data points in context. Behavior management can look very different in schools: where some schools opt for meditation, others choose suspension when faced with challenging student behavior. Given the subjective nature of behavior management, we must always remember that the rate at which your school administers behavior management is as much – if not more – a reflection of school policy and its implementation as it is of student behavior. It is imperative that these metrics lead to asking questions rather than jumping to conclusions. Spikes in these numbers are opportunities for fixing broken systems and processes, never for tracking or targeting groups of students.
Block #2: Engagement
As incredible and effective as schools can be, the reality is that student outcomes are the product of a collaborative venture between educators and caregivers. Without the support of the adults at home, your kids will have a much harder time having a successful year. We all know how important the start of the school year is for establishing a strong rapport with families. We’ve found that investing in a parental engagement platform that automatically produces clear metrics has been indispensable in cementing these bonds and in keeping the pulse on when it’s time to reinvest. In addition, we recommend taking a deeper dive into at least one to two of the following suggestions to ensure that you’re keeping engagement levels high throughout the year:
Attendance at Family Events and Conferences - There is nothing that screams disengagement more loudly than a barely attended parent-teacher conference or a half-empty Back to School night. Low attendance rates at important school events are a sign that it’s time to craft a re-engagement strategy.
Response Rates to Surveys - With this metric, surveys are your friend! Not only do they yield important qualitative data, they can also tell you how involved your family population is. How many caregivers are responding to the survey? Where do these response rates drop off? A parental engagement platform can provide similar information As with all the other data points we’ve recommended thus far, what’s important here is the why. You can supplement this by leaving space for comments, where families can tell you where they are least satisfied and which of their needs aren’t being met. Your survey should also leave space for families to share what’s been working well. You want to see where your school is already succeeding–and where else it needs to double down.
Satisfaction Rates/Net Promoter Score - Another quick and easy way to keep the pulse on how satisfied your families are. It can be as simple as asking families how likely they would be to recommend the school to others.
Similar data points can be used to monitor teacher engagement, which is just as critical. Are the adults in the building showing up to meetings? On time? What are their major pain points at the start of the year? Figuring this out sooner rather than later will help maintain high levels of school health.
Block #3: Attendance
You’ve gotten safety and engagement down. Now you need to make sure that kids are in the school building and in their classes on time. In order to get a real sense of attendance at your school, it’s important to look at multiple data points. From what we’ve seen, conflating attendance with a single measurement leads to missing out on valuable information about the real reasons for fluctuating attendance rates (i.e. students not coming to school during state testing). You’ll want to look at the following metrics in combination with one another, as well as over time on a routine basis:
Percent Present - Here, it’s important to be able to drill down into low attendance rates at more granular levels. Which students are chronically absent? Are there certain classrooms or grade levels where attendance is particularly low? Being able to come up with precise, data-driven answers to these kinds of questions will help influence policy in ways that will ultimately benefit your community.
Percent On Time - You’ll also want to tie this data point to other metrics, such as assessment. Is a student doing poorly in math because it’s the first class and they are consistently late? Keeping on time attendance high is critical to ensuring that students are growing as much as they can.
Block #4: Assessment
Last but not least, we have assessment data. Let’s say that your school is safe, families and teachers are engaged and students are in their seats on time every school day. With this foundation set in stone, it’s time to make sure that your students are growing. How well are they learning and retaining skills? The list of data points that you could use to monitor this is near endless and varies by age group. We recommend approaching this sea of data from the following two angles:
Formative Assessment Data - Formative assessment data is powerful because it can help you course correct before higher stakes summative assessments come around. But in order to leverage formative assessment data, you’ll need a clear plan as to when you’ll collect this data, how and by whom it will be analyzed and when results will be communicated to all stakeholders. Otherwise, you risk collecting information about student outcomes without being able to implement it in a way that enhances your school’s success. If you haven’t established a clear timeline for collecting formative assessment data, it is high time to do so!
Gap Analyses - How you slice and dice your data is as important as what you collect. We’ve seen more and more schools in recent years break down assessment data by special populations, such as Emerging Multilinguals, Non-Permanent Housing and Free and Reduced-Price Meal Eligibility. This new way of engaging with data plays an important role in making sure that schools remain equitable places where all students – regardless of background – have a chance at receiving a high-quality education. Monitoring these gaps from the first weeks of the school year better positions you to close them by the end of the year.
What we’ve offered above is not a recipe but a general guideline for where to look when assessing your school’s health and what to look at. Looking at multiple data points and treating the information in your dashboard as a launching pad for questions will help keep your school on track. Ultimately, which data points you choose to monitor in order to assess school health should be aligned with the long-term mission and vision of your school, as well as with the goals that have already been set for this year. We wish you the best of luck and a happy, healthy school year!