Today, few parents, educators, advocates and policymakers are fully satisfied with accountability and improvement frameworks. In too many places, current approaches are not leading to better student outcomes and are incentivizing myopic decisions. These approaches have fomented distrust among stakeholders who need to be partners for change to happen.
The need for actionable data and urgency to address disparities and accelerate learning in every school has never been greater. In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, student achievement has declined across the country, reversing two decades of improvement.
Student achievement and high school graduation are essential outcomes to measure, but alone don’t chart a path to improvement. Today’s school accountability systems—student achievement and graduation from high school—are essential and relatively easy outcomes to measure. Other indicators of student progress and outcomes, as well as measures of school and community conditions, are harder to measure, but also important to understand.
Student Success Indicators can help
Policymakers, educators, community members and parents know there are many contributors to student success. They want to understand whether students are on a trajectory for success after high school. They want to see whether teachers are skilled and using high-quality textbooks. They want to know whether schools have safe and healthy climates for learning. They want to eliminate disparities affecting students from marginalized communities and make sure all students have equitable opportunities.
Greater and more creative use of student success indicators could help. Because these sorts of measures provide more holistic insights into how different groups of students are doing and what is influencing student learning, they can be referred to as student success indicators or, according to an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2019, as equity indicators.
Student success indicators should be used more broadly. While federal laws establishing school accountability requirements changed in 2015 to allow for the use of some additional measures besides test scores and graduation rates, research by Education First and others show the actual use and impact of student success indicators in states and schools has been mostly weak and underdeveloped. These indicators have proven harder to design and harder to use at scale in accountability systems. In figuring out a better way to use these indicators in accountability systems, we can learn from existing efforts and innovations.
