Resources

Measuring School Quality Beyond Test Scores

Our toolkit offers guidance for communities interested in building a school quality framework. This toolkit includes primers on using alternative assessments like surveys, administrative data, and school walkthroughs. This guide also includes sample focus group protocols and an inventory of open-source perception surveys to help get you started.

School Quality Measures Framework

This short document provides an overview of the categories that make up the SQM framework. The SQM framework has been successfully piloted by the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment. MCIEA is a partnership of eight public school districts and their local educator unions working together since 2016 to create a humanistic accountability system that is grounded in educational equity. SQM tools and resources are available free and open-source through the Education Commonwealth Project.

Student and teacher perception surveys are a key component of the SQM framework. This document provides an overview of the individual survey items for each category in the SQM framework.

Collecting & Visualizing Data

The SQM Data Dashboard visualizes the SQM framework. The framework has been built around multiple measures, which include academic, social-emotional, and school culture indicators, in order to piece together a fairer and more comprehensive picture of school performance. The SQM dashboard has been successfully piloted by the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment and is available free and open-source through the Education Commonwealth Project.

Our open-source code for the SQM dashboard is available on GitHub to help communities visualize the SQM framework using the SQM dashboard.

Our open-source code for the Beyond Test Scores data visualizer is available on GitHub to help communities build the data collection and visualization infrastructure necessary for implementing a successful school quality framework.