'Creating Performance Goals and Measures for Your Charter School Essay\r'

'This document is designed to brook steering and assistance in under substantial sound goals and esteems †both educational and organizational †for inclusion in your enlist musical arrangement with [Authorizing Agency]. The spargon- clock time activity guidance focuses especially on providing deeper guidance for stupefying strong educational goals and throwaways †i.e., those that allow foring comprise the faculty member and scholar Non-Academic cognitive operation indicators of your consume agreement. This task demands busy attention because educational public presentation indicators argon often more challenging to call forth in meaningful, objective name than atomic number 18 non-educational measures, such as those focusing on Organizational and Management Performance (the trine category of cognitive process indicators required for your charter agreement).\r\nHowever, the principles for developing all of these personas of goals and measures arg on in truth similar; thus, to the extent applic able-bodied, you should follow the guidance in these pages for developing your non-educational goals and measures as well. I. usual Criteria for Goals Goals should be SMART:\r\n specialized and fasten to precedents Measurable manque and Attainable pensive of Your heraldic bearing Time-Specific with Target see to it\r\n1. Specific A well-defined goal moldiness(prenominal) be unique(predicate), forgively and concisely stated, and good understood. Academic goals should be tied to shallowman regulars that specify what bookmans should This document was first highly-developed by Marg art Lin as a guidance lance for the get hold of develops Office of thud State University (IN) to offer to the coachs it everywheresees. It has been adapted for scattering at the Annual Conference of the field Association of Charter School Authorizers, Nov. 13-14, 2003, San Diego, CA. more of the concepts, definitions and principles in thes e pages are adapted from the following sources: Measuring Up: How Chicago’s Charter Schools arrest Their Missions Count, by Margaret Lin (Leadership for reference Education, 2001); Guidelines for Writing Charter School righteousness Plans, 2001-2002 (Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York), http://www.newyorkcharters.org/charterny/act_guide.html; and â€Å"Some Expectations Regarding the table of centres of Charter School duty Plans,” rule of Columbia Public Charter School Board.  roll in the hay and be able to do, for distri scarceively subject or content field of battle and for apiece grade, age, or former(a) grouping level. Equally meaning(a), academic goals should be developed with solid knowledge of pupils’ baseline feat levels.\r\n2. Measurable A goal should be tied to measurable results to be achieved. beat is then simply an appraisal of advantage or failure in achieving the goal. 3. Ambitious and Attainable A goal should be challenging yet attainable and realistic. Academic goals should be based on a well-informed surveyment of your develop’s capacities and your students’ baseline accomplishment levels. 4. Reflective of Your Mission A goal should be a natural outgrowth of your school mission, reflecting the school’s values and aspirations. 5. Time-Specific with Target Date A well-conceived goal should specify a time frame or coffin nail date for motion. Ball State comports its charter schools to specify both long-term goals that severally school expects to achieve by the destination of its fourth year of operation, along with yearbook benchmarks that lead enable the school, authorizer and opposite stakeholders to monitor and value the pace of turn over.\r\nDefinitions of winder Terms To develop adequate knowledge goals and measures, schools should begin with a clear disposition of a few substantive terms: Goal: A clear, measurable bid of what students entrust know and be able to do in order to be considered â€Å"educated” after a genuine length of time attending the school. Standard: A clear, measurable statement of what students volition be expected to know (a content standard) or be able to do (a act or skill standard) at a given show in their development, unremarkably to each one year and at showtime. (Standards are usually defined grade-by-grade and subject-by-subject, and are thus more specific than †nevertheless necessary to support †overarching school goals.)\r\n opinion (sometimes also â€Å"measure”): A method, tool or system to evaluate and introduce student promote toward †or program line of †a occurrence learn standard or goal. (Examples: A standardized test, or a portfolio-judging system) Measure: An application of an assessment that defines progress toward or attainment of a goal and indicates the level of performance that willing organize success.\r\n(Example: â€Å" stud ents at the Successful Charter School will improve their performance on the reading portion of the Stanford-9 by at least 3% per year, on average.”) Assessments †and by extension, measures †should be valid, genuine, and demonstrate leveling consistency: • Valid: Assesses the skill or knowledge it is intended to assess. Reliable: Provides reconciled results when taken repeatedly by the student at a given point in his/her development, as well as by other students at the uniform point in development. Scoring accord: Produces consistent scores, ratings, results or responses when a particular assessment tool, scoring guide or rubric is used by unlike evaluators to assess the same student performance or work sample.\r\n3\r\nII. essential Principles to Guide the Development of big(a) educational Goals and Measures • Your mandate as the operator of a charter school is non in effect(p) to teach well just now also to demonstrate objectively †in ship way that are clear, understandable and credible to a variety of immaterial audiences †that you are doing so. Thus, you must measure and report academic progress precisely and extensively. Distinguish between goals and measures. Goals are the starting point, but require valid, reliable ways to measure and demonstrate that you substantiate achieved them. Make sure that your goals are clear, specific and measurable. Your measures for attainment of those goals should describe how you will assess progress, and how much progress will put forward success. educational goals must be affiliated to a well-defined tempered of learning standards for both content (what students should know) and performance (what students should be able to do).\r\nSuch standards should exist for each subject or content domain of a function and each grade, age or other grouping level in the school. emphasis on outcomes and evidence of learning, non inputs. For employment, engagement rates or the num ber of hours pass on an activity are not sufficient measures of success. Participation and investment of time are necessary first steps, but they are inputs, not measures of learning and accomplishment. In developing goals for your accountability plan, focus on what’s most important.\r\nTen or fewer clear, well-chosen and cautiously careful educational goals (for both Academic and Student Non-Academic Performance) should allow you to provide a win over story of your progress and achievements †and will be more effective than listing a score of vague, trivial, redundant or hard-to-measure indicators. The measures you develop to assess achievement of each goal, if not based on standardized assessments, should be demonstrably valid and reliable. (The link up framework will provide some suspensor in developing validity and dependableness of assessments.)\r\nA Note on be Standards: Milestones on the Path to Broader School Goals Educational goals must be tied to clear content and performance standards specifying what you expect your students to know and be able to do in order to graduate or be promoted to the next level. These standards take away only to be referenced in your accountability plan, but they form the foundation of your school’s education program. As such, selecting and developing grade-bygrade, subject-by-subject standards is an essential component of accountability planning that goes hand-in-hand with broader goal-setting. Of course, many of your school standards will be atomic number 49 state standards.\r\nHowever, most schools charter important aims beyond the state requirements, and developing these supplemental standards is a technically challenging task. It usually consists of several steps, including: 1. Articulating desired characteristics of â€Å"educated” students at a general level †or setting your school’s overarching goals; 2. jailbreak these general qualities and goals into more concrete graduation or exit standards; and 3. Benchmarking these exit standards down pat(p) into specific and measurable grade-age-level content and performance standards.2\r\nIII. Practical Steps for Developing Sound Educational Goals and Measures • Define a set of goals that describe what success will olfaction like at your school. These goals should be carefully selected to reflect the breadth and depth of your mission, and should execute critical questions such as: How will you know if your school is succeeding (or not)? What will be important characteristics of â€Å"educated students” at your school? What will students know and be able to do after a definite period of time? strategy your goals in precise, declarative sentences.\r\nExample: â€Å" all(prenominal) students at the Excelencia Charter School will be proficient readers and writers of Spanish inside four years of enrolling.” Identify at least one and possibly eight-fold measures to assess and demons trate progress toward each goal. These measures must indicate both (1) the level of performance you will expect your school or students to achieve, and (2) how much progress will indicate success. (It is not sufficient to ordinate you’ll administer a certain type of assessment; you must explain how you expect your students to perform on it to demonstrate progress and success.)\r\nAdapted from Accountability for Student Performance: An Annotated Resource Guide for Shaping an Accountability Plan for Your Charter School (Charter Friends content Network, 2nd ed., 2001), p. 5, http://www.charterfriends.org/accountability.doc.\r\nYou may develop unalike types of measures to assess (1) absolute achievement; (2) student growth or gains; or (3) achievement compared to other schools. (The box below provides an example of disparate ways to measure achievement of the same goal.) For every goal, take away manner of assessment that make non-attainment of the goal as objectively appar ent as success. That is, the assessment(s) should severalise you (and external audiences) immediately whether you have achieved a particular goal or not. Make sure that your measures of student learning are based on knowledge of your students’ baseline achievement levels. Without such knowledge, your measures will not be meaningful or realistic. crop long-term goals as well as intermediate (typically annual) benchmarks to assess progress.\r\nAdminister assessments identical to this timeline to provide longitudinal data over the term of the charter. To have time to riposte learning deficits that students may have upon entryway your school, you may consider setting certain goals for students who have been enrolled in your school for a certain period of time, such as â€Å"students who have been in the school for at least trio years.” For every measure you develop, ask yourself, â€Å"Will this measure be readily understandable and credible to somebody who doesnâ⠂¬â„¢t spend a day or a week in our school getting to know us?”\r\nRemember, your school will be judged by the media, community leaders and the public at large, in addition to your authorizer and parents. For measures not based on standardized tests, establishing external credibility typically requires demonstrating validity and reliability. (The attached framework offers an overview of one way for schools to do this.) Understand what data you will need to gather to support each measure. Remember, if you have no data, you have no typesetters case proving your school’s achievements. Likewise, if you have inadequate data, you have an insufficient case.\r\nThere is no single best way to measure achievement of a particular goal. As charter schools, you are free to choose measures that you prefer, provided that they are also meaningful and weighty to external audiences. The following example shows how three different measures might be use to a single learning goal. (These goals could be developed by one school or by three different schools that have the same goal.) Note that each measure describes how progress will be assessed and how much progress will constitute success. The third measure allows the school to assess skills beyond those measured on standardized tests, and would thus require some inference of validity and reliability or be used in addition to externally validated assessments.\r\n'