School Check: 2017

HOW TO USE SCHOOL CHECK

This tool is a simple survey designed to help you do a healthy school check-up. Questions are based on strategies and principles from The Strategic School: Making the Most of People, Time, and Money as well as other learnings from our work with high-performing schools across the country. The assessment is organized according to three principles we’ve seen high-performing schools use to organize resources. Each principle contains specific practices, against which you will rate your school’s performance to the best of your knowledge.

School Check is designed to be a conversation starter, not a high-stakes evaluation of resource use at a school. To fully engage with this tool, support your conversation with quantitative data such as class sizes, and student and teacher schedules, etc. Also bring to your conversation a qualitative understanding of things like teaming structures, practices, and efficacy; and student intervention and support strategies, etc.

When you are finished, the results will compute an average number for each principle and compare your results to best practice. You can print a blank copy of School Check [PDF] to use as you complete the online assessment.

What do my results mean?

There are two ways to use the results of this questionnaire.

• If multiple people have completed School Check, the first step is to compare results, and discuss areas of disagreement. This can help increase everyone's understanding of your school’s resource use.
• High incidence of lower-level results indicate areas where current resource use may not support the strategic practice. Keep in mind that it may be a strategic choice for a school to be farther behind on the developmental spectrum for any given practice given its priorities and student needs. Your results will help you prioritize what areas need further investigation and what action should be taken.

What can I do with this information?

To learn more about how real schools across the country are innovating around resource use, explore the School Design in Action section of our website. Here, you will find detailed, interactive school profiles organized around the school design principles.