Education Week - September 28, 2016 - 31

At Vt. Schools, a Look Under the Hood

ducators have gotten
used to pouring over
spreadsheets filled with
test scores to get a sense
of their students'-and
schools'-strengths and weaknesses.
What they don't often see: feedback
from other teachers, administrators,
and students who can offer a fresh perspective on where a school stands when
it comes to instruction, resources, climate, financial efficiency, and more.
A handful of states-including,
recently, Vermont-have worked to
change that, using a model borrowed
from other countries and known in
Great Britain as "school inspections,"
in which a team of experts or educators visits a school and offers objective feedback on teaching, learning,
management and more.
Several states have experimented
with the model for their lowest-performing schools, including Kentucky,
Massachusetts, and New York, said
Craig Jerald, the president of Break
the Curve Consulting, who has studied
the strategy.
Vermont, by contrast, plans to
eventually conduct inspections, which
it calls "integrated field reviews," in
all its schools, whether low-performing or not. The state began piloting
the program last school year in about
40 schools and is continuing to test
it this year in about 50, with the ultimate goal of reviewing each school
every three years.

Refining the Process
Vermont is still figuring out how
the reviews could be used to support
schools under the new Every Student
Succeeds Act, said Josh Souliere, the
state's assistant director of education
quality reviews. The reviews aren't expected to be used for federal accountability, but they could be a component
of state-level "technical assistance" for
low-performing schools, he said.
But the true purpose of the reviews
is to help educators and district leaders get a sense of how a range of
factors-including curriculum coordination, instruction, personalized
learning, and the social and emotional health of students-affect the

overall success of a school and its
"supervisory union" (Vermont's term
for local education agencies).
"These reviews are intended to
measure the things that we can't
measure quantitatively, making sure
students are experiencing an equitable
education, both across the district and
within a school," said Lori Dolezal, an
education quality manager at the Vermont education department, who took
part in some of the reviews conducted
last school year. "It's not punitive, it's
exploratory. It's OK to find problems
of practice. That's the whole point."

Personalized Look
Under Vermont's pilot, a team of
15 to 20 reviewers-among them
teachers, specialists, central-office
staff, officials from the state education agency, and even students-visit
a particular supervisory union. Then
they break up into teams of about
three or four people and head out to
individual schools.
Those teams will spend about half a
day at a school collecting "evidence."
That can mean conducting interviews
with teachers, students, and parents,
and observing classes. Teams also consider supporting documents that get at
how well the school is implementing
the state's education quality standards,
including local tests, curriculum materials, budgets, and policies and procedures. A second team will visit the
school for the second half of the day
and perform a similar review.
A school can rebut anything in the
formal report that leaders think is
unfair or inaccurate.
At least for now, it's up to local administrators and educators to decide
what to do with the information.
School officials who took part in last
year's process generally say the feedback was illuminating and felt supportive-even if the prospect of reviewers
coming in and judging a school made
some educators nervous at first.
"It felt very personalized," said
Emilie Knisley, the superintendent of
the 450-student Blue Mountain district in northeast Vermont. "It felt like
you could take the recommendations
and take action on them in a way that

you can't when you're just getting a
set of test scores."
Knisley also served as a reviewer
herself, visiting schools in other parts
of the state. That was eye-opening, too.
"It ended up resulting in a lot of
people being able to share experiences across schools" and get ideas
they could take back to their own systems, she said. "It's rare that you get
to talk to people in other districts."
Already, in some cases, the reports
have helped nudge school boards,
which often oversee supervisoryunion budgets, to provide funding for
resources reviewers felt were lacking.
For instance, the team visiting Knisley's district noted that some students
didn't have access to the same classroom technology as others in the same
school. That gave local leaders ammunition to ask the school board for
money to install new interactive white
boards in elementary classrooms.

Aiming to get
beyond just
spreadsheets
and test scores,
Vermont and other
states experiment
with inspections
to scope out
schools' strengths
and weaknesses
By ALYSON KLEIN

ESSA Connections
Experts see plenty of potential for
the reviews in the ESSA era. The new
law requires states to consider multiple measures of performance, not
just test scores, in evaluating school
performance.
"It's an elegant way to handle a lot
of things that people now want out of
an accountability system," including
gauging school culture and support
for teaching, said Jerald, who has examined school inspections in Great
Britain and elsewhere, but not specifically Vermont's system.
And the reports are most valuable
when reviewers are blunt and don't
seek to spare a school leader's feelings, Jerald added. "Improvement begins with honesty," he said.
Inspections can "give you a real
diagnosis of what's going on in a
school" in a way that test scores alone
can't, said Linda Darling-Hammond,
the president of the Learning Policy
Institute, a research organization in
Palo Alto, Calif., and in Washington.
But they are not enough on their own
as a turnaround tool, she cautioned.
"For this to work, you need to have
a good improvement strategy to follow
up the review," she said.
n

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Education Week - September 28, 2016

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