Head of School's Blogs

Performance Indicators

by Bill Gerritz 1 May, 2008

ISB aims to be a learning focused school, one where every decision focuses on ensuring that each student has the best possible opportunities to achieve.  But how do we get beyond the rhetoric and the blah blah? What evidence would allow any reasonable person to look at ISB and say, "Ah yes, this really is a learning focused school" or the opposite?  One type of evidence involves comprehensive reporting and analysis of learning results. Like most other schools, we have such reports for everything but learning.  For example, we have excellent reports on the finance and operations. Dr. Costessi with the Board Business Committee prepares lengthy documents that analyze the financial results from multiple perspectives. The Board relies on these documents in its stewardship of the school's financial health.

The Board needs and the whole school community deserves a similar report on learning results.  The Board  needs robust information allowing it to persistently ask and answer such questions as, “How effective are the learning programs at ISB? Are students making as much progress as possible?  How does learning at ISB compare with international standards?”  In addition, the information should support our school improvement work by helping us monitor the effectiveness of our learning processes. It would serve other purposes as well. This year the Board’s Strategic Development Committee set out to develop such so called, “performance indicators.”  

The Committee has made substantial progress but we have a long way to go. Here is what we have so far. The indicators align with the five points of ISB’s Vision as well as the school’s Mission. They emphasize results rather than processes and resources.  They incorporate hard data such as achievement scores and program participation rates as well as soft data such as parent survey results. When completed, the performance indicator document will likely be about 20 pages in length. The latest draft runs to 9 pages. The Strategic Planning Committee will continue to develop indicators. Next steps include asking faculty members to critically friend the indicators and asking Board members to identify those that are most useful from their perspective. I expect the indicators to make a quantum leap in quality over the next month and I will report on progress.

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Comment 3: Patricia Bonilla

It is my impressin that ISB is very well organized school and information intensive. I also believe that with Power School we, as parents, can follow up closely the performance of our kids. Parents are also invited to be part of the decision making process. The new standard evaluation MAP is a very personalized tool to watch individual progress. Thank you for putting so much effort.

Comment 2: Sankaranarayanan

It is my knowledge that ISb is a distinguished school. The achievement of the school is really appreciable and teachers all over the world can be inspired from the schools like this Thank you for running such a great firm

Comment 1: Dereck Rhoads

Classroom practices and measures from the “effective school” movement might be interesting data points as well. Achievement scores and program participation rates as well as your soft data should provide a good measure. This is my first visit to your website - love the blog! Here's mine: http://nlcommunities.com/communities/dhrhoads/default.aspx

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