Across the country, pervasive inequities persist in students’ academic opportunities and outcomes. To promote more equitable learning environments, districts and schools are investing in professional learning, instructional materials, policy and procedural changes, and student programming. But measuring and monitoring the progress of these equity-related investments can be daunting for several reasons:
- Valid and reliable survey data can be difficult to collect. Surveys are perhaps the most common and cost-effective way for school districts to determine whether students, families, and staff perceive that their school communities are becoming more equitable over time. However, obtaining sufficiently high survey response rates—especially from families—can be difficult due to survey fatigue.
- Commercial school climate surveys may not be aligned with the goals and objectives of a district’s equity initiatives. School climate surveys are a particularly valuable tool for monitoring the progress of districtwide initiatives and strategic plans. However, many school districts use commercial surveys that are not customized to their local context and do not include survey items that assess perceptions of their equity-related activities. Under this circumstance, reliance on school climate data alone limits what a district can learn about the strengths, weaknesses, and potential impact of its equity initiatives.
- Measuring changes in belief and bias is complex. Many equity initiatives, interventions, programs, and practices seek to change educator hearts and minds to create and sustain supportive student-teacher relationships. While school climate surveys can assess perceived changes in student–teacher relationships, measuring changes in teacher and administrator mindset is harder. Because educators may answer questions in a way that portrays themselves in a positive light, self-report measures can paint an overly rosy picture.
- Valid and reliable tools to measure and monitor the progress of equity-related practices within school systems are not widely available. A dearth of instruments to validly and reliably measure and monitor the progress of equity-related initiatives often requires school systems to adapt or develop tools on their own. They may do so despite lacking the expertise to determine whether homegrown instruments are psychometrically reliable and valid.
REL Mid-Atlantic conducted a landscape analysis to better understand how school districts are tackling the challenge of monitoring the progress of their equity initiatives. We found that educator evaluation systems, educator self-assessments, equity audit tools, and listening sessions are the most common equity-related measures school districts employ—to complement their use of school climate survey data.
