Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 brought stronger accountability for U.S. public schools. Under the act, schools are required to annually report the test results for their entire student population as well as specific subgroups (e.g., students in special education, low-income families, and minority groups) to assure adequate progress towards proficiency. Schools that fail to show sufficient progress face sanctions. This focus on accountability continues under the latest Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Under this law, states and districts are looking for meaningful metrics to identify schools for both accountability and improvement purposes.

While the findings of the overall effects of NCLB have been mixed, there exists some evidence that accountability pressure from NCLB led to positive changes in average achievement levels in math (Dee & Jacob, 2011; Wong, Cook, & Steiner, 2011). Focusing on NCLB’s effect on achievement gaps, Reardon et al. (2013) find that while gaps did not close on average because of the policy, those states affected most by the requirement of subgroup-specific reporting (i.e., states with more schools with sufficient subgroup sizes) experienced a reduction in white-black and white-Hispanic gaps. The authors carefully note that they cannot rule out other explanations for this reduction. It seems likely that a policy focused only on holding schools accountable for overall average achievement, does not necessarily mean schools will increase performance for all. Generally, it appears that gauging school performance requires looking at several outcomes simultaneously, not only average proficiency, but also student growth and schools’ contributions to subgroups of students. Yet we have little understanding of the relationship among these three aspects of school effectiveness to inform school accountability design.

In this paper, we explore the multidimensionality of school performance using state administrative data from Washington. We group school performance into three general categories: average performance, school growth (value-added), and gaps. Besides student academic achievement on tests, we also focus on the extent of chronic absenteeism (> 10 days of absences during the school year), discipline, and graduation rates. The goal of this paper is to provide an understanding of the relationships of these multiple school performance measures. This knowledge should be valuable to both practitioners and researchers in designing and evaluating education policies.

Second, using a staff and student survey from Seattle Public Schools, the largest district in Washington state, we explore the relationship between perceptions of school processes on each of our measures of school performance. We have developed several composite measures of school processes from the surveys including: perceptions of school climate, student self-reflection, student-teacher relationships, collaboration among teachers, perceptions of teaching support, and general work culture for staff. The hope of this exercise is to shed more light on the black box that produces each of these observed performance outcomes.