The fundamental purpose of the school improvement process is to drive innovation and assess the effectiveness of improvement efforts. The utility of the school improvement process rests on the degree to which schools can quantify the impact and return on investment of programs and school improvement plans. ECRA helps schools by providing professional development and advanced analytic tools to quantify impact.
ECRA’s School Improvement app provides analytic tools to project individual student performance and calculate effect sizes to assess the return on investment of programs and school improvement initiatives. The school improvement app is powered by ECRA’s proprietary analytic cloud infrastructure and delivered through its single sign on ECRISS platform.
Measuring the impact that school improvement initiatives, interventions, and programs have on growth recovery requires moving beyond merely reporting standardized test scores.
ECRA’s Growth Recovery Solution is aligned to the priorities of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund and provides school leaders with the framework and tools to drive growth recovery within their district.
While raising proficiency levels of students is the long-term goal of schools, its use as an annual school improvement metric is inadequate. To scientifically and equitably assess improvement efforts, one must focus on measuring student growth, not aggregate improvements in proficiency. ECRA uses predictive analytics to project achievement at the individual student level, which provides personalized achievement benchmarks for individual students. ECRA then expresses the degree to which students outperform or underperform personalized projections as an effect size.
Effect sizes are then linked to district resource allocations so informed decisions can be made regarding programs and other investments and their effect on student outcomes.
ECRA provides a wide range of consulting and professional development services to support the school improvement process. From helping school districts think through their assessment programs to in-depth training and facilitation of school improvement and admin teams, ECRA’s experts can ensure your school or district’s process is aligned to evidence-based practices. In addition, ECRA provides professional development and custom research services on specialized topics such as local assessment development, benchmark development, program evaluation, teacher evaluation, and more.
In the August 2022 issue of School Administrator magazine, published by The School Superintendent’s Association (AASA), Dr. John Gatta, CEO of ECRA Group, contributed an article on the topic of academic return on investment (ROI).…
Listen to Dr. John Gatta, CEO of ECRA Group, in this interview with Larry Jacobs on Education Talk Radio, discuss how districts can measure academic return on investment (ROI). Dr. Gatta helps define academic return…
PBL CUSD 10 sought a platform that would allow them to compare their student data against both national, state, and local norms.
Through a process of careful data analysis and community feedback, the KCSD96 Board of Education is constantly evaluating how to better serve the community.