Indiana officials didn’t have to go far to find a new model for improving schools

Indiana is looking across state lines for inspiration as it revamps its school turnaround efforts.

State officials are creating a school improvement system based on Chicago’s “5 Essentials” to assist struggling schools across the state in building up leadership, academics, and operations. The highly regarded model was developed by researchers at UChicago Consortium and administered by UChicago Impact, a nonprofit group that creates research-based school improvement tools and is affiliated with the University of Chicago.

The 5 Essentials model focuses on five qualities that strong schools share — effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environment, and ambitious instruction. The Indiana Department of Education has built its own evaluation around these attributes. The state will start using its model based on the 5 Essentials at low-performing schools in their annual school quality reviews, which begin in October and are done by a team of experts, local educators, and school administrators or board members.

“It’s a huge project,” said Robin LeClaire, the state’s director of school improvement. “We’re going in and doing this comprehensive review so that we can help make schools better by helping them determine which, and how many, of these that need to be focus areas.”

Schools in their second or fourth year of consecutive F’s based on their 2018 letter grades will receive the reviews. The grade could be delayed due to glitches in grading state tests, but schools are expected to be informed of their ranking before the reviews begin. This more intensive layer of state support is separate from what is required by the federal government for all F-rated schools and schools where certain groups of students, such as English-learners or those with disabilities, have particularly low test passing rates. Last year, 28 schools were reviewed.

According to the consortium’s research, if schools rate high on three of the five measures they are 10 times more likely to see student improvement than schools that are weak in those areas. And if one of those areas is consistently low, it can be very unlikely that a school will improve at all.

As states transition from school improvement models developed under the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act to ones updated for the newer federal Every Student Succeeds Act, the 5 Essentials was a better fit, LeClaire said. Not only is the model more streamlined than the previous “eight turnaround principles” the state used, but it also emphasized the supportiveness of school environments.

“We all know that social-emotional behavior wellness is a huge piece in school success,” LeClaire said, adding that if schools were not addressing that at all, it was unlikely they’d see the academic improvement they might expect, even if they make other changes to teacher training and leadership.

All members of the review team will be trained on how to do the reviews, which include a pre-visit analysis of the school during a planning meeting, an on-site observation, and follow-up visits.

During each review, the schools, which will be notified by the state some time in October per a state memo if they qualify for the intervention, will have all five areas assessed, but will choose two to focus on. At the end, they’ll get a final report from the review team with recommendations on how they can move forward and grow. The process will continue into the spring, with final follow-up visits occurring in May.

One area where Indiana’s efforts will differ from Chicago’s is officials here won’t use the 5 Essentials survey that Chicago schools have used for years. The survey of students, teachers, and parents resulted in so much progress in schools that Illinois voted in 2013 to include it in its state school rating system. The survey, which is proprietary and cannot be used without a fee, won’t be used in Indiana’s reviews. For that reason, state officials built their own rubric and contracted for a separate school climate survey.

The survey has been used in Indiana before — Indianapolis Public Schools piloted a version a few years ago, but the initiative didn’t take off. Indiana State Board of Education members also heard a presentation on it back in 2016 when the state began rewriting its grading system to comply with ESSA. Federal law now requires states to choose metrics that are not test-score-based as part of its school ratings, but the problem is that many of the indicators that have become most popular — attendance, surveys on “school climate,” and metrics on social-emotional learning — are hard to measure objectively.

The 5 Essentials survey could be one exception, said Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a nonprofit founded by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2008. The group consults with states about accountability systems and how to improve them.

“It is the only climate survey that I know of that has valid and reliable data attached to it,” Levesque told state board members at a work session last month.

Indiana has not made plans to use the 5 Essentials survey as part of its state A-F letter grades, although the board is in the process of revamping its grading system, and other school climate surveys will eventually be included, LeClaire said.

Read: Indiana schools getting 2 state grades? Too confusing for parents and educators, experts say.

On Wednesday, the education department will ask the the state board to approve the new review process, including the costs associated with it — $132,000, mainly to cover travel for the review team and substitute teachers for educators who need to leave their classes to do the reviews.

LeClaire said she hopes the updated reviews will be a resource to schools that have struggled. So far, past quality reviews have received good feedback, she said.

“I don’t want it to feel punitive,” LeClaire said. “We are going in strictly for support, to help (schools) identify the areas that predict school success.”

Correction: Sept. 11, 2018: A previous version of this story said UChicago Impact developed the 5 Essentials survey. It was developed by UChicago Consortium.