Outcomes, Impacts, and Processes: A Framework for Understanding School Performance

This framework offers an improved measurement strategy states and districts can implement to answer three critical questions about school performance: 1. How are students doing? 2. How much does the school contribute to how students are doing? and 3. What is happening in the school?

Organizing valid, reliable, and robust performance measure data into complementary groupings of student outcomes, school impacts on outcomes, and processes that drive those impacts provides rich, fair, and diagnostically useful information. This information can be used by education officials in a variety of contexts—beyond federal accountability—to better identify and understand student and school needs and make more informed and equitable decisions.