Arnie Zar-Kessler
One of the challenges confronting Jewish Day Schools that can fall just under the radar screen – becoming almost a ‘stealth’ challenge – is adhering to one of the tenets of effective management by using data to drive decision making, and then sharing those data to help others understand the school better, as a means of ‘transparency’ with significant constituencies, including parents.
Business schools, business books and business models are awash with language that attempt to inspire organizations and their leaders to become scrupulous about defining goals, seeking evidence for progress towards goals, and using that evidence – frequently (but not always) quantitative data – to drive decision making.
Independent Schools generally, and Jewish Day Schools in particular, find themselves so focused upon helping individual students, building community and mobilizing resources towards achieving the loftiest goals of their missions that little bandwidth is available for assembling the tools that will help our schools achieve the vision of outstanding management through effective use of data. Thus, while we remain focused on our religious and educational mission, we may be missing an opportunity to utilize tools that will enable us to more effectively achieve that mission.
Before I describe an approach we’re taking here at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston, let me briefly discuss both the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ promises of assembling and using data.
>External. There’s evidence that public schools – and indeed, a wide range of institutions – are taking the lead on holding themselves up to accountability, through a greater sense of ‘transparency’, both towards their various constituencies and for internal uses, as well. In other words, many public school systems seem pretty far down the road of measuring a full array of characteristics of their schools and operations, and are sharing those data quite openly. This leads to a growing sense that public schools are unafraid to hold themselves accountable, while private schools – Jewish Day Schools being counted amongst that group – have been less open about their measures. When considered as part of a larger marketing opportunity, private schools’ apparent reluctance to publish measures – and perhaps lack of measures themselves – may provide something of a peril (as if Jewish Day Schools needed another one) when prospective parents compare our programs with our greatest competitors – the public schools.
Looked at another way, consider the parents of a four year old, who know the test scores of their local public schools, the faculty-teacher ratios, the metrics whereby the school assesses its own program, and even the salaries of the schools’ top administrators. By comparison, a Jewish Day School may seem opaque – to the point where our schools may either be seen as not wanting to share student and institutional outcomes, or uninterested in being responsive to parents as consumers with an array of choices.
>Internal. Rigorous attention to a process that sets goals, defines expressions of those goals, measures outcomes against these, and then uses these measures drive excellence in organizations – whether they be hospitals, businesses, or even schools. In order to best manage and govern the institution, institutions commonly build some sort of effective portrait – or ‘dashboard’ that can provide data in depth to decision makers.
At Schechter, we felt we could use – at both the professional and governance levels – a ‘ready reference’ dashboard on the current state of the school. This reference would help us compare our performance against certain agreed upon benchmarks, and thus, would help us to be more effective leaders of the school. These comparisons would help us to be more strategic in our work, identifying critical areas of strength and opportunity. With this unified tool, we hoped to avoid the danger of consistently placing urgent needs above important ones, and to make sure that the most salient issues were identified and responded to. By developing a tool, we hoped to be better equipped for our long term and strategic planning, as well as for our developing and assessing our annual school wide objectives.
Thus, we developed a ‘school report card’, now in its second iteration. The school report card is an attempt to address the great challenges to Jewish Day Schools on how to embrace the idea of data-driven-ness for our own uses and to indicate to our communities a sense of transparency (the ‘external’ opportunity), and enriching our deliberations about key strategic directions (the ‘internal’ opportunity), while recognizing the limited nature of our resources; not only financial, but also ‘bandwidth.’
The school report card is intended to give an annual measure on a range of critical data points, assessing the overall well-being of the school. These data points include finance, governance, enrollment, academic, development and more and are largely based on ‘industry standards’, as set forth by Independent School Management (ISM) and the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), as well as our own ‘Zahav’ strategic plan. As such, it follows – in part – the sort of approach that Moody’s Investor Services took when analyzing the entire independent school ‘industry’ last year; identifying and agreeing upon key metrics, rigorously measuring ourselves against those metrics, using the data to influence our conversations, and sharing some of the data where appropriate.
The report card analyzes a series of ‘metrics’ in each of fifteen categories, generally with no more than three measures for each category. Most of these metrics were chosen in accordance with recommendations from ISM (their ‘stability makers’) and NAIS (their ‘key measures’). Others have been chosen based upon more local information and insights, specifically our Zahav strategic plan. It is worth noting that these measures may be modified in future years, and that the report card should ultimately be the result of input and deliberation that includes both the board and professional staff.
The first year’s, or ‘beta’, document was developed exclusively for ‘internal’ use. That is to say that last year’s version was both a ‘test run’ of the format and processes involved, and was shared with the Board of Trustees, the Hanhallah and the faculty. This current year, with the use of Independent School Management’s ‘Strategic Board Evaluation Online’ tool, we now have two levels of reports – one for the Board of Trustees, and another for the professional leadership team. A distillation of the data gathered will be shared with parents, as part of our regular weekly school newsletter, the Shavuon.
With the report card (and ISM’s support), we now have ready, comparative measures on our financial stability, our strategic planning process, executive leadership, Board performance, faculty culture, support for professional development, Board / operations differentiation, development, recruitment, faculty salaries and benefits, and facilities. This is in addition to other measures we’ve already been employing on academics, including provision of special needs services, parent satisfaction, extra-curricular programming, faculty-student ratios, and even some measures around the effectiveness of our Judaic Studies program.
This expanded document is now ready to be used as a working document for planning and assessing the school’s progress on its strategic plans and school wide objectives. As such, it will continue to be primarily an internal document, but opportunities for sharing elements of the report card are being explored. And while some aspects of the data gathered last year have been shared with parents (standardized test scores, attendance rates, faculty-student ratios), we envision that additional selected elements of the data will be published this spring, as further evidence of institutional transparency.
By better understanding and agreeing upon what are the critical metrics, by assessing ourselves against industry standards, and by regularly sharing these data, we can more effectively locate areas of relative strength and areas of opportunity and challenge. These can then become avenues upon which we focus (perhaps through our next strategic plan) and monitor our progress.
Finally, we can share some of these data with our families to help them better understand our work as leaders of the school, and we hope our commitment to rigorous analysis of our work and our commitment to openness with them. Our goal is to never lose sight of the educational and religious vision that lies at the heart of our enterprise, but also to embrace the idea that data-driven enterprises tend to succeed the best, and that we can hope someday to be counted amongst those, as well.
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