Executive Director's Note

Betty Edwards

As teachers return to their classrooms

this year—or step over the threshold for the first time—they commit to helping students succeed and grow to meet the promises of their futures. That commitment manifests itself in the way a teacher engages students with new learning, the determination of the school community to ensure that each student is known and appreciated, and the focus of school leaders on providing a student-centered organizational structure.

Providing the focus and resources to help create and sustain schools that ensure student success is actualized in the work of National Middle School Association and reflected in our foundational document, This We Believe; supporting resources; professional development services; and in our advocacy work.

This We Believe addresses the critical characteristics of effective middle grades schools in three main areas: curriculum, instruction, and assessment; leadership and organization; and culture and community.

A few years ago, NMSA developed the School Improvement Toolkit, which provides a means for gathering perceptions about how well a school is addressing the characteristics of effective middle grades schools as addressed in This We Believe. As technology enhancements have come to the forefront, we have worked to revise and refocus that tool.

Renamed the Middle Grades Assessment, this online assessment will be released at NMSA's 36th Annual Conference and Exhibit, November 5–7, 2009, in Indianapolis. The assessment includes a variety of comprehensive questions that measure the characteristics of highly successful middle grades schools and provides the school's stakeholders with significant insights about school effectiveness. Members of the school staff, individually and anonymously, provide responses for each question on a five-point scale from "Excellent" to "Poor."

Upon completion of the assessment, the school staff receives an executive summary, reporting results by area and characteristic, along with the identification of the top three and bottom three rated characteristics. Schools also receive a statistical table report with an average and standard deviation for each item and characteristic. Averages and standard deviations also are generated for each of the three broad areas. This information provides a basis for school improvement programs.

The assessment incorporates a number of open-ended items, and the final report includes information about the responses. As an enhanced option, schools can include customized questions to obtain input about issues critical to the school. Additional reports are also available to meet specific school needs. As the number of schools implementing the assessment increases, the report also will include national comparisons.

As with the current version, the school staff can also choose to have consultants visit the school to provide external insights and recommendations. A series of other resources and professional development services will be available to the school as NMSA partners with the staff on school improvement.

Currently, the Middle Grades Assessment is designed to gather responses from the school staff. Later this year, NMSA will release a version of this online assessment for students and another for families. A core set of items will be common to all three assessments, enabling school leaders to compare responses to the same item.

While this one data source is not sufficient to make decisions about how well a school is addressing the needs of students, it provides perceptual data, which is an important part of a larger process to determine the success of a school. Along with artifacts, observations, records, and external evaluators, stakeholders' perceptions provide data educators can use to develop a school improvement plan.

Just as we gather information about how successful students are in their learning, we also must gather data about how successful we are in providing effective learning environments for students. By using data, we can make the necessary school improvements to ensure that every student receives an enriching education in a caring and supportive environment.