The snapshot of school management effectiveness

Abstract

Concern over quality of education is increasing as enrollment levels and even completion levels in countries edge toward 100%. So far, there has been much more streamlined advice available to countries and donors on how to assess enrollment and completion than on how to assess quality in schools. There is, thus, a need for advice on how to assess quality—ideally advice that can actually be embodied in sets of questions and questionnaires that have already been tried and found to be useful.

The Snapshot of School Management Effectiveness (SSME) addresses that need. It is being designed under the U.S. Agency for International Development’s EdData II project as a tool that can quickly assess levels of educational quality in a district, region, or country. Recent research on school quality and effectiveness, and on other practical checklists created by other analysts, projects, and countries, were all used as a source of inspiration for many of the questions and items the tool addresses. Finally, the tool was designed to be applicable via one-person-day school visits, and the intent was to enable visits to approximately 50–60 schools to produce information on the quality of management factors. In a sense, the tool is designed so as to extract the maximum amount of information from a set of schools that can be obtained in one school day.