Willms, 1995
Reynolds & Teddlie, 2000a, 2000b
Rowe & Hill, 1994
Rowe, Hill, & Holmes-Smith, 1995
Rutter, Maughan, Mortimore, Ouston, & Smith, 1979
Sammons, 1999
Sammons, Hillman, & Mortimore, 1995
Scheerens, 1992
Scheerens & Bosker, 1997
Stringfield & Teddlie, 1989
Townsend, 2007a, 2007b
van der Werf, 1997
Walberg, 1984
Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1993
Wright, Horn, & Sanders, 1997
To identify and describe specific factors that affect students’ achievement in school, researcher John Hattie (2009, 2012) synthesized close to sixty thousand studies and found that 150 factors correlated significantly with student achievement. Although a few of these factors are outside of a school’s control, the vast majority represent activities and initiatives that schools can implement and cultivate to increase their effectiveness. Hattie’s top fifty factors are listed in table I.1. Those that a school can control are shaded.
Table I.1: Top Fifty Factors Influencing Student Achievement
Source: Data from Hattie, 2009, 2012.
As indicated in table I.1 forty-six of the top fifty factors (92 percent) are within a school’s control.
For decades, schools have used educational research like Hattie’s to select individual factors to implement in their schools. For example, many schools have implemented response to intervention (RTI), the third factor in Hattie’s list. Other schools have implemented formative evaluation systems, the fifth factor in Hattie’s list. In some cases, schools have worked to improve their effectiveness relative to one, two, or several factors. While those efforts are laudable, they represent too narrow a focus. All of Hattie’s factors need to be arranged in a hierarchy that will allow schools to focus on sets of related factors, progressively addressing and achieving increasingly more sophisticated levels of effectiveness.
From a high reliability perspective, the factors identified in the research to date are best organized into the five hierarchical levels shown in table I.2.
| Table I.2: Levels of Operation for a High Reliability School | |
| Level 5 | Competency-Based Education |
| Level 4 | Standards-Referenced Reporting |
| Level 3 | Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum |
| Level 2 | Effective Teaching in Every Classroom |
| Level 1 | Safe and Collaborative Culture |
The hierarchical relationship of the levels depicted in table I.2 has some intuitive appeal. Level 1 can be considered foundational to all other levels. If students and faculty do not have a safe and collaborative culture in which to work, little if any substantive work can be accomplished. In essence, level 1 addresses the day-to-day operation of a school: What are the rules? How do we follow them? What will happen when the rules are not followed? How do we work together to make the school run optimally?
Level 2 addresses the most commonly cited characteristic of effective schools: high-quality instruction in every classroom. Stated differently, school leaders must make sure classroom teachers are using instructional strategies in a way that reaches all students and are taking appropriate steps to improve teacher competence when this goal is not being met.
High-quality instruction is a prerequisite for level 3, a guaranteed and viable curriculum. Guaranteed means that the same curriculum is taught by all teachers so that all students have an equal opportunity to learn it. Viable means that the amount of content in the curriculum is appropriate to the amount of time teachers have available to teach it (DuFour & Marzano, 2011; Marzano, 2003b). Levels 1 through 3 are common fare among current efforts to make schools more effective.
Level 4 moves into a more rarefied level of school reform, because it involves reporting individual students’ progress on specific standards. At any point in time, the leaders of a level 4 school can identify individual students’ strengths and weaknesses relative to specific topics in each subject area.
Level 5 schools exist in the most rarefied group of all—one in which students move to the next level of content as soon as they demonstrate competence at the previous level. Matriculation, then, is not based on the amount of time a student spends in a given course, but rather on his or her demonstrated mastery of content.
Leading and Lagging Indicators
In order to know what to work on and to measure their success at each level, school leaders need ways to assess their school’s current status, gauge their progress through each level, and confirm successful achievement of each level. Leading and lagging indicators are useful to these ends. The distinction between leading and lagging indicators is this: leading indicators show what a school should work on to achieve a high reliability level (they provide direction), and lagging indicators are the evidence a school gives to validate its achievement of a high reliability level (they provide proof), particularly in areas where there is general agreement that the school is not doing well.
Leading indicators are “important conditions that are known to be associated with improvement” (Foley et al., n.d., p. 2). That is, they help school leaders decide what to work on to achieve high reliability status at a specific level. For example, at level 1, one leading indicator is “Faculty and staff perceive the school environment as safe and orderly.” School leaders can use a survey to measure the extent to which faculty and staff perceive the school environment as safe and orderly. If perceptions of safety and orderliness are very high, school leaders may not need to focus on that area. If perceptions of safety and orderliness are low, school leaders might decide to implement initiatives or programs designed to improve the safety and orderliness of the school environment. Alternatively, low average scores on particular items might indicate that an area is not important in the school. For example, at level 1, town hall meetings and community business luncheons may or may not be important considerations for a school. Essentially, leading indicators help school leaders identify areas that are important to the school in which the school is already doing well, areas that are important to the school and need to be addressed, and areas that are not important to the school. For areas that are important to the school (both those that need to be addressed and those in which the school is already doing well), lagging indicators can be designed.
Lagging indicators provide concrete evidence that a school has achieved a specific high level of performance, particularly in an area initially flagged for low performance. For example,
