Project Definition

Our Purpose

Guiding Principles

• The descriptive framework should encompass the key characteristics of schools that can be influenced by educational policy
• It should be relatively easy for a school leader or observer to evaluate a school according to this framework
  • No complex estimating or analysis should be required
  • No subjective opinions should be required, only objective evaluation
• The key characteristics of schools should be measurable with one or more dichotomous, categorical, or quantitative variables
• The variables should be orthogonal, to eliminate duplication in measurement

Statement of Scope

For our purposes, a school is defined as any organized, long-term program of learning activities made available to a broad population of children and adolescents. This definition could include everything from large comprehensive high schools to small, personalized charter schools to virtual schools in which the only connection between students and teachers is via the Internet.

Our focus is on secondary schools, given that we expect most of the variation between schools to be found at the secondary school level. At the primary school level, variation does exist but falls into fairly well-defined categories. For example, many elementary schools choose to implement a set curricula across the school (e.g., Open Court, Houghton Mifflin, etc.) or follow a set philosophy (Montessori, Waldorf, Individually Guided Education, etc.).

Our framework is meant to capture variation at the school level. In other words, our framework encompasses structural and organizational qualities of schools that are implemented in a more or less consistent fashion throughout the school. Classroom-level variations such as a teacher’s personal instructional techniques (e.g., lecture vs. hands-on activities), or the nature of a teacher’s assessment practices (e.g., multiple-choice vs. essay questions) are beyond the scope of this project. By setting our scope in this way, we are limiting our research to those variables that can be manipulated by the levers of educational policy. As a result, we would view a construct such as "school culture" to be an outcome, rather than part of the descriptive framework.

Student characteristics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and special education status are extremely important and have been shown to have a significant impact on school success; however, we do not consider them to be part of a school’s structure or operation and thus they are outside the scope of this framework. Instead, we believe that student characteristics will likely interact with the variables in this framework in ways that are deserving of further research. In other words, students characteristics will likely "moderate" the impact of the variables in the framework on school success. Thus, the goal of our overall research effort is to discover not only “what works”, but also “for whom”.

Go to the OverviewOfFramework

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