School Capacity and Perceived Improvement in School Improvement Grant Case Study Schools

• In Event: Schools’ Experiences With School Improvement Grants (SIGs): First-Year Results From SIG Case Studies

Abstract

The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, as amended under ARRA, reflects the premise that implementing substantial interventions in persistently low-performing schools can catalyze dramatic action that yields immediately perceptible improvements in the school’s capacity, thereby setting the school on a path toward higher student performance. While school turnaround involves a process that unfolds over time, prior research suggests that improvements to certain school-level conditions might foreshadow later improvements in student learning outcomes and could thus be thought of as intermediate outcomes or leading indicators of improvement. Such conditions include instructional coherence, staff expectations of students, student engagement, staff collaboration, and a safe and an orderly school climate (Beaver and Weinbaum, 2012; Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Bryk et al., 2010; Osher & Kendziora, 2010; Purkey & Smith, 1983), among others. Schools exhibiting such conditions can be described as having higher overall capacity to support student learning.
The objective of this paper is to posit a set of leading indicators or markers of school capacity that might signal future student learning gains and then explore how stakeholders in 25 case study schools described their schools relative to these indicators during the first year of their SIG grant. Using both qualitative and teacher survey data, the research team rated schools on each of the following indicators: teacher trust, strategic leadership, instructional leadership, transformational leadership, instructional coherence, safe and orderly climate, locus of responsibility (internal or external), presence of clear and shared goals among staff, and staff collaboration. Ratings on each leading indicator were combined into an index and then classified schools as having low, moderate, or high capacity based on natural breaks in the distribution.
In addition to measuring overall capacity, the study team sought to gauge the extent to which respondents perceived that the school had improved during the first year of SIG. To do so, we also analyzed perceptions of change in the following areas related to school turnaround: teacher collaboration, safe and orderly climate, leadership, data use, instructional quality, staff expectations for student achievement, student engagement and connections to the school, and material resources/facilities. A school was rated as having perceived improvement in a given area if respondents from at least two respondent groups (e.g., both teacher and administrators) described improvement. Then, we tallied the number of areas in which respondents described improvement in each school. As we will describe in the presentation, we examined the relationship between perceived improvement, strategic leadership, the SIG grant size, and overall capacity. This paper will describe case study schools in terms of capacity, and report the most common areas of perceived progress. Findings are currently embargoed but will be available at the time of the conference.
In summary, the proposed paper draws on rich, qualitative data and applies a systematic approach to understanding capacity and perceived improvement in schools that are seeking to turn around a history of low performance.

Authors

• Kerstin A. Carlson Le Floch, American Institutes for Research

• Karen Manship, American Institutes for Research

• Seth Brown, American Institutes for Research