March 14, 2010
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William L. Bainbridge, President & CEO of SchoolMatch®
“SchoolMatch evaluation techniques are grounded in the search for what is right in a school system.”
Give Dr. Wm. Bainbridge and his colleagues credit: They saw an opportunity to meet a need among mobile families in this country, and they devised a means to fulfill it. These educational research professionals began SchoolMatch® 20 years ago to provide auditable data about K–12 public schools in America to evaluate performance, compare those results, and rate schools accordingly. Families in the relocation process and their employers needed the information to choose proper schools in their new locations. Corporate clients also receive guidance in their nonprofit efforts to support education and their school-business partnerships. Realtors find the SchoolMatch information to be helpful in assisting their clients with school-aged children to buy a house. SchoolMatch® has successfully conducted more than 1000 Educational Effectiveness Audits of school systems in over 30 states throughout the country. Those schools and school districts are part of the SchoolMatch School Membership program, which uses a “mean-matched” device—a customized identification of school systems with similar characteristics. This system compares schools with others in terms of socio-economic status including adult education level, family income level, poverty rates, and English language proficiency. Dr. Bainbridge is the former superintendent of three school districts in Ohio and Virginia and former Assistant to the Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction. He was named Educator of the Year by the Ohio PTA, is a Fellow of the American College of Forensic Examiners, and Diplomate of the National Academy for School Executives. Technos talked to Bill Bainbridge via email in May.
T: SchoolMatch was instituted to fulfill the need for hard data about K–12 schools in the United States. What initially prompted your group to begin gathering and making available the information that SchoolMatch now provides?
W.L.B.: Parents. Before we started SchoolMatch in 1986, as educational administrators we received scores of questions from parents who found themselves moving from one part of the country to another, seeking comparative information about schools. As educators, we would often receive questions like, “My family is moving to Peoria shortly, and we need to buy a new home. Where are the best schools in the Peoria area?” It occurred to us that a national resource whereby parents could easily and quickly compare the effectiveness of public schools was sorely needed. So, we set about building such a resource. The result is SchoolMatch. We conducted survey research and had the cooperation of two Fortune 500 companies in facilitating focus groups of relocating families to determine what their potential clients wanted.
Is there a correlation with No Child Left Behind requirements?
The SchoolMatch approach to analyzing school effectiveness is multi-dimensional and systemic, with careful attention to comparing performance indicators among like socio-economic student population groups. The No Child Left Behind approach fosters measurement of student performance on an intrastate basis (within a state’s boundaries) and within state-mandated proficiency, criterion-referenced examinations at various grade levels. There are no provisions for the type of interstate comparisons that we provide. The “test” becomes all-important, and the measure of effectiveness uni-dimensional. NCLB has yet to recognize that public school systems cannot guarantee the same success for every child.
Fortunately, there are multiple dimensions to learning and multiple ways of rewarding students for their efforts. The SchoolMatch FairCompare Audit of Educational Effectiveness process seeks out those dimensions, recognizes excellence, and highlights opportunities to enhance and extend successes based on many different data elements that document aspects of effectiveness.
Corporations and their nonprofit entities are also among your client base. Have you found them open to your services and recommendations for improvement of their programs to support education?
Yes. Corporations and their nonprofit entities are looking to support practical solutions to practical problems faced by today’s school systems as school personnel seek to educate an increasingly diverse American population. Our approach and the recommendations that result emphasize pragmatic steps that can be taken to increase school system effectiveness. Corporate leaders embrace a databased approach to problem solving. In some cases the recommendations lead to major programmatic and even governance changes within school systems.
What types of data does SchoolMatch through its FairCompare Analysis and Audit gather? What is the significance and utility of providing benchmark districts for comparison?
We look at a variety of data elements that research on school effectiveness has shown provide insight into how effective schools are. Such indicators include student performance on norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests, attendance patterns for students and teachers, student dropout rates, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate program offerings, grade inflation, and community perceptions of school effectiveness. Community indicators include perceptions about school leadership, emphasis on learning, school climate, monitoring student performance, and high performance aspirations.
Benchmarks are significant only if they can be determined in relationship to similar school populations with similar socio-demographic characteristics and relatively similar sizes. With complete and current databases on each of the 15,573 operating public school systems in the country, we are able to identify performance characteristics of similar school systems and then pinpoint where a single school system “stacks up.” That becomes the benchmark from which real improvement can be measured. We believe it is unfair and counterproductive to compare the performance of a single school system to its geographic neighbors because the student populations to be served are different. Rather, effective benchmarking comes when like student populations are assessed.
What happens after your recommendations are made? How do the schools respond, and what measurements are used to determine success?
We are generally asked to highlight our observations, commendations, and recommendations at a community public meeting that has been well publicized to assure that all members of the community who wish to attend, can attend. Such a session establishes useful accountability ties between school system officials and the community. School and community officials respond to our assessment(s) in many ways. Among the most common are to: 1) communicate the assessment element to all those concerned; 2) validate the assessment and determine the dimensions of the issue(s) identified; 3) determine the resources necessary to address the issue; 4) develop an action plan; 5) implement a plan and communicate progress to the community; and 6) evaluate the outcome. Since SchoolMatch recommendations are generally databased, it is relatively straightforward to document progress based on this data. When leaders in the community realize our interest is only in assisting the community and its students and taxpayers, participants are almost always open to our recommendations.
The SchoolMatch Web site offers realtors and parents an invaluable service for relocation. What feedback do you get from these groups as to the effectiveness of the information you provide?
SchoolMatch Report Cards are easily accessible to all members of the public through the SchoolMatch Web site. The service is comprehensive, current and offers only auditable comparative information on each and every one of the public school systems in the United States. The focus of the information is on effectiveness, performance, and features.
Most importantly, the Reports are comparative by presenting information in national percentile format. Parents and other relocatees can search quickly for school options, easily compare quality and effectiveness indicators, and make a decision regarding which three to five communities in which they might wish to purchase a new home. Armed with such comparative data, parents are in a much better position to query educational leaders about the nature of each school system’s academic program. SchoolMatch also provides assistance through its checklist for parents, “What To Look For Once You’ve Narrowed Your Choice of Schools.”
Also, the SchoolMatch new “Seven Weeks to a Smoother Move” guide has been particularly well received. And our new site for residential property investors can also be quite helpful.
What reception have you gotten, as your services have grown through the years? Are schools and their administrators happy to have SchoolMatch involved? What do parents and teachers think? Your press coverage has been consistently good…do you find that the schools in those areas are as enthusiastic about the audits as the press has been?
The impact of the SchoolMatch program of service has steadily increased. Today, we average 3 to 4 million “hits” a month on our Web site and continue to serve a variety of publics including parents, corporate relocation and recruitment offices, realtors, corporate site selection firms, chambers of commerce, economic development agencies, family attorneys involved in child custody matters, and—of course—school systems themselves. The fact that we have been productively engaged in providing these many constituencies with auditable school data for 20 years attests to the acceptance of this program of service.
In our educational effectiveness audit work and our financial analysis engagements, we have generally found school systems to be particularly receptive to our efforts. First, we provide a national perspective within which to evaluate each individual school system. Because we are national, we can advise on a number of solutions we have seen across the country that may be useful to our individual clients. Second, we are databased in our approach. Focusing on the data removes elements of personalities and political pressures from the analysis and creates a level playing field from which all constituencies can move forward. Third, as outside experts we have no particular axe to grind. We work just as hard to locate and highlight commendations as we do to find opportunities for improvement. This balanced approach serves school officials well in their efforts to improve the educational program.
According to “an April 1, 2006, search of the 22-field SchoolMatch® Database…only 16 percent of the nation’s public schools consistently provide ‘What Parents Want’ in public education.” What do parents want?
Findings in many parent surveys suggest that great numbers are satisfied with the education their school provides, but deeply concerned about the quality and caliber of American public education in general. This is an indication of the diversity of viewpoint when parents are asked to state their perceptions of public education.
We don’t ask parents what they think; rather, we ask parents what they want. We take what an individual parent describes to us as his or her “ideal” school system in a questionnaire, and then we identify school systems in a given geographic area that most match their requirements. We aggregate those responses to develop a composite picture of the characteristics of school systems parents value most. That composite represents “What Parents Want.”
Every school system in this country has aspects to recommend it and areas in which it excels in promoting student performance. The challenge is to identify a schooling environment that is most likely to meet each parent’s expectations. That is the basis of the SchoolMatch program of service.
The “business” of education, while utilizing statistics still depends on people and the “art” of teaching. How does SchoolMatch reconcile its hard data with the subjective nature of evaluating the facilitation of learning?
Unfortunately, many school evaluation activities are seen as “finger-pointing” exercises designed to seek out what is wrong with a school system’s educational program. This is not the way SchoolMatch consultants approach evaluation. Rather, SchoolMatch evaluation techniques are grounded in the search for what is right in a school system. Again, performance data point the way and enable us to recognize, catalogue, and identify those elements of the “art” of teaching that are producing performance results. Once identified, it is our hope that such elements can be replicated throughout the school system, thereby enriching and facilitating learning for as many school system stakeholders as possible.
With your background, you’ve had a good perspective from which to observe American public education, warts and all. In your opinion, what can/should be done to improve it? Are there any “quick fixes”?
There are no “quick fixes” to improving educational effectiveness. Above all, careful consideration of common-sense solutions to problems can go a long way to improve school climate, focus on learning, enhance student performance monitoring, instill high expectations from parents and community members, and improve school system leadership. We have developed a number of policy suggestions we believe would help. Please feel free to go to http://www.schoolmatch.com/articles/sesJun03.htm to examine these suggestions.
Dr. Wm. Bainbridge is also a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Dayton. Many of his articles appear in the Chief Academic Officer electronic newsletter. Email him at bainbridge@schoolmatch.com.
Read Dr. Bainbridge's essay, "Left Behind By Federal Plan," in our Featured Article section.