More-EQUITY AUDITS/SCHOOL ASSESSMENT

KatherinH (KatherinH@edc.org)
Mon, 28 Oct 1996 09:49:31 -0500


As part of our work with school districts around the country, we have developed
two audit tools that might be of interest to you. One is a climate survey that
enables us to develop a comprehensive sense of how the school is PERCEIVED along
a number of dimensions, by the different stakeholder groups within a school
community. The usefulness of this tool is that it allows different groups to
discuss their perceptions, points out those areas where different or all groups
"don't know" as indicators for further investigations, and helps track how
groups are feeling about their school at a given time. Another tool we're
working on is a model of disaggregating student and staff data by district and
school level and helping the individual schools and the district office develop
their own questions from the data. For example, in one school there was a high
percentage of African American boys in the lowest quartile of achievement so the
principal asked, "who are these boys" and discovered they were predominantly in
special education. With this information she began to ask, why such a high
percentage of African American boys in special ed, why are they not getting
services or appropriate teaching/learning strategies to help them move up, etc.
Both are tools that have equity imbedded in them so that they cannot help but
surface the issues.

We can send you copies if you'd like. One thought I have is that if individuals
and organizations would like to send audits or other tools to us we could put
them into our resource library for duplication and dissemination--as well as on
our world wide web site. If people are interested in this, forward the
materials to us (on Mac disk if possible) and we'll make them available.

Katherine Hanson
WEEA Equity Resource Center
EDC
55 Chapel St
Newton, MA 02158
617-969-7100
katherinh@edc.org


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