How To Evaluate the Quality of Your School

Creating a Learning Organization: Reality vs Our Future Ideal

An important step in creating a learning organization is making an honest assessment of the current conditions in your school. The following survey includes conclusions presented by different researchers who have examined conditions in schools across the country. To assess the current reality of your school, use the following scale to rate each statement in terms of how well it describes conditions in your own school:

     1-3       We are not at all like this
     4-7       We are somewhat like this
     8-10      We are very much like this

I.  Schools and Change

Characteristic	Rating
Schools are not organized to respond to the needs and interests of students. They are bureaucratic monopolies that rely on a captive audience for their customers. There are few incentives - and fewer rewards - to improve.
The issue is not that individual teachers and schools do not innovate and change all the time. They do. The problem is that the change is unproductive, focusing on the margins of practice rather than on the core of teaching and learning.
From the perspective of teachers, much of school life is an endless cycle of first implementing and then abandoning new initiatives. Teachers are left with the impression that no one in the system really understands why change is occurring. For teachers, the concept of change becomes a matter of coping with management's tendency to introduce and then abandon educational fads.

II.  Teaching

Characteristic	Rating
Teachers believe that it is their job to teach and the student's job to learn. Thus, they are responsible for teaching but not for student learning.
Typical classroom instruction is dominated by "teacher talk". Teachers work very hard and students sit passively and watch them work.
Teachers work in isolation. There is little opportunity for serious professional interaction in which teachers share ideas, observe each other teaching, or assist each other in professional development activities.

III. Curriculum

Characteristic	Rating
The typical school curriculum is overloaded with trivia. Schools cannot do what they should be doing as long as they continue to do what they are doing.
There is typically no uniform school curriculum. Students studying the same subject with different teachers in the same school often learn vastly different content and have vastly different experiences.
Subjects are taught in isolation. Teachers make little effort to connect content from different subjects into a meaningful conceptual framework.
Schools typically have no meaningful curricular goals. They focus on means (materials, programs, instructional arrangements, etc.) rather than on endÄstudent outcomes.
Because they are unclear on the outcomes they are trying to achieve, schools are typically unable to offer valid evidence that they are accomplishing their intended purpose (i.e., student learning).
Teachers have not worked collectively to identify the criteria by which they will assess student work.
The inability to establish a results orientation means that the procedures for continuous improvement do not exist in schools.

IV.  Structure

Characteristic	Rating
Schools have no structure. They are simply convenient locations for a bunch of individual teachers, like independent contractors, to come together to teach discrete groups of students.
Schools have no infrastructures to support teacher collaboration in addressing schoolwide problems. Teachers, like their students, carry on side by side in similar, but essentially separate, activities.
Schools are structured as top-down bureaucratic hierarchies that rely heavily on rules for teachers, who can ignore much of the top-down direction when they are behind their own classroom doors.