How many of the students who enter your school in ninth grade graduate in four years?
What percentage of your graduates must take remedial courses in college or community college? What percentage of those finish college?
Does your leadership team successfully interact with "hard-to-reach" parents with activities such as home visits, weekend meetings, and meetings outside of regular business hours?
How many lowincome and many minority students are enrolled in advanced courses?
How many teachers from different disciplines work together on a regular basis?
Are the aspirations, strengths, and weaknesses of each student known by at least one faculty member or other member of your staff? How do you ensure that the staff member uses that information appropriately to help the student become successful in all classes and activities?
What percentage of the classes per week at your school are primarily lecture driven?
Aside from student government, do students have a voice at your school?
Where you able to answer these questions and support the responses with data?Break Ranks:
Seven Cornerstone Strategies to Improve Student Performance
Establish essential learnings a student is required to master in order to graduate, and adjust the curriculum and teaching strategies to realize that goal.
Increase the quantity and improve the quality of interactions between students, teachers, and other school personnel by reducing the number of students for which any adult or groups of adults is responsible.
Implement a comprehensive advisory program that ensures that each student has frequent and meaningful opportunities to plan and assess his or her academic and social progress with a faculty member.
Ensure that teachers use a variety of instructional strategies and assessments to accommodate individual learning styles.
Implement schedules flexible enough to accommodate teaching strategies consistent with the ways students learn most effectively and that allow for effective teacher teaming and lesson planning.
Institute structural leadership changes that allow for meaningful involvement in decision making by students, teachers, family members, and the community and that support effective communication with these groups.
Align the schoolwide comprehensive, ongoing professional development program and the individual Personal Learning Plans of staff members with the content knowledge and instructional strategies required to prepare students for graduation.
