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What Educational Indicators? The Case for Assessing the School Context

University of California, Los Angeles, and The RAND Corporation

A number of current federal and state efforts are attempting to create education indicator systems in the hope that these systems will improve the monitoring of the condition of education, inform policy decisions, and provide better accountability mechanisms. This article argues that the valid and useful indicator systems will include assessments of school context as well as of student outcomes. Context indicators can be used to monitor schooling resources and processes; they may help forestall educators’ tendency to narrow their programs in order to "look good" on limited outcome measures; and they can provide information about the context in which particular outcomes are achieved. A review of the schooling literature suggests three general constructs that can serve as grounding for developing school context indicators: access to knowledge, press for achievement, and professional teaching conditions.

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