Spotlight on school board goals: evaluating validity evidence for an operationalized board goal monitoring system

Most of the recommendations for school board governance come from the opinions of former board members, superintendents, and professional organizations rather than empirical research. Many frameworks agree that school boards should set goals, but technical guidance is virtually nonexistent.

This dissertation spotlights school board goals and interim goals at a specific school district. In a pair of analyses – one for elementary and one for middle schools – this dissertation examined patterns of change in three years of student literacy assessment data to evaluate the assumptions implied in the district’s goal monitoring practices. The elementary analysis found evidence of widespread cohort differences, suggesting concerns with practices that interpret year-over-year comparisons between students that are in the same grade in different years (i.e. comparing this year’s grade 3 students to last year’s grade 3 students) as evidence of improvement. Conversely, a comparison of models in the middle school analysis found evidence that monitoring earlier grades to predict outcomes on later assessments was a reasonable practice. Together, both papers presented evidence that interim goal assessments were significant predictors of goal assessments, but the analyses also documented notable differences in the pattern of effects between elementary and middle school contexts.

The findings of this dissertation emphasize the importance of examining local practices so that research-based findings can complement theory, improving the information available to local decision-makers.