School Wise Press SARC Services

SARC BITE 34 | APRIL 28 , 2006

Your SARCs Should Produce a Return on Your Investment

Let's think beyond compliance, for a moment, and consider your SARC program in a different light. Suppose we asked this question: "What does your SARC program produce?"

This powerful question about practical results is a more revealing one than asking, "What does something cost." It requires asking, "What benefits result from every dollar spent?" Economists and business managers think this way by habit. It is called cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analysis. Even public agency leaders are looking at people and programs in this light. It is cost-benefit thinking that led Pres. Clintons team and governors from both parties to disassemble the welfare system. And it is how the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget decides which federally funded programs live or expire.

With SARCs, cost-effectiveness means relating three things: (a) the reports you create, (b) the actions you take with these reports, and (c) the cost of your SARCs. Districts are producing SARCs of varying quality, some done with care, and others with little regard for the intended reader of the report. But few district leadership teams are putting their schools' annual reports to work. To help you get more from your SARCs, we've distilled our seven years of experience to share leading districts' best practices. See if some of these ten recommendations will help you get better results from the way you report your schools' results each year.

1. Marketing schools to parents choosing schools. This is the way of the world, and not just because of charter schools' successes. Districts are advertising in newspapers, on billboards, on radio and on television, plugging the strengths of their districts. Winning one student for one year is worth roughly $5,500. Youll see a quick return-on-investment in using SARCs to market schools if you use well-designed, brief SARC summaries this way. Give them to realtors, leave them in dentists' and doctors' offices, and hand them to parents with kids in preschools. To see what an effective, one-page distillation of school facts can look like, click here.

2. Marketing schools to parents with children in your schools. There are no more captive customers. Parents know more about their options, and as a result, are increasingly ready to walk. The Census Bureau shows that one out of five American families moves every year. Give them reasons to stay by showing them your schools' healthy vital signs. Your parents are also your best referral messengers. Giving them a brief pass-along report to give to friends may be the best dollars your district ever spends.

3. Marketing schools to teachers. With teachers still scarce in math, science and special education, and with the deadline for Title I schools this June (all teachers must be highly qualified), your HR director is on the hot seat. Finding strong candidates requires selling candidates, not just on your district, but on the schools where they may work. Candidates will request school placements, and know they've often got leverage. Candidates will research schools on their own. Why not give them your schools' key vital signs, the way you want them to see be seen?

4. Helping principals tell their schools' stories. Your principals meet their public at back-to-school nights and at open houses in the spring. What are you doing to help them tell their schools stories? Using fact sheets that distill schools' key vital signs into a one-page summary report, you can help your principals hand out a report that puts their schools best image forward. After parents go home, they'll read and reread what they have been given.

5. Helping the staff of schools in II/USP, HPSG, CSRP or PI see themselves in a mirror. When your schools which are on the state or federal watch lists get help from external evaluators, one of the first steps they'll take is to look at their schools' history of results. Seeing school level results clearly is not easy. There's often too much detail, too much clutter, too much data, and far too little perspective. Good SARC reporting should provide that view from 500 feet up. Seeing results over three years at a glance, so that anyone with fifth-grade math skills can get it is key. Seeing how a school compares with other schools at the same grade level, in the county and state, helps a school's instructional team know where they stand Expect this from good SARCs.

6. Planning for site-based teams. When it is time for site council members to tighten their belts and tackle the Single School Plan for Student Achievement, what do you give them to work with? Among the key resources should be SARCs that make sense. SARCs that follow only the legislative requirements report just on students scoring proficient and advanced on the CSTs. Better SARCs look at all students' results. Most SARCs provide no school-level or county-level CST benchmarks. Better SARCs provide both. Your planning teams will invest 40-80 staff hours in their Single School Plan for Student Achievement. Help them do so with their eyes wide open.

7. Building business partnerships. When your principals look for allies in the business community, they'll be expected to stand-and-deliver their schools results coherently. If your principals are reluctant to give their SARC to a business leader, you should help them find an annual report that they'll be proud to deliver. The standard for reporting in the business world is the corporate annual report. Get an annual report for a corporation in your community, and see how your schools' SARCs compare.

8. Helping seniors apply to colleges. Many private colleges want to know about the high schools their applicants are applying from. This puts GPA and class rankings in context. It also helps admissions staffers decide if a student made ample use of a high schools limited resources. A student who took two AP courses in a high school where only two were offered is a lot more attractive candidate than a student who took two AP courses when 14 were offered. Your high schools' SARCs should be good enough for your seniors to use when applying to college.

9. Helping inform citizens attending school board meetings. Whether the issue is the district budget or closing schools, debates need to be anchored to facts. When citizens are debating policy, good things can happen. But when citizens are arguing about the facts themselves, time is wasted and tempers flare. Help anchor those debates by bringing school facts to board meetings for all to see. Good SARCs should enable you to digest and distill relevant facts at any time.

10. Helping high school leaders prepare for WASC accreditation reviews. If you have ever prepared for a WASC review, you know that the data binder consumes dozens of hours of staff time. It is not fun. It is not easy. And its educational value is debatable. Help your high school staff with robust SARCs that provide the schools key factors from 500 feet elevation. Help them with reports that interpret results, not just present them. Help by providing county and school level benchmarks, not just in the area of testing, but in staff preparedness and resources.

REFERENCES AND RESOURCES

Levin, Hank and McEwan, Patrick J. Cost-Effective Analysis: Methods and Applications, Second Edition. Sage Publications, 2001. 308 pgs.

"Expect More" web site from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget This office reviews every program that receives federal funding to see if it performs well, and to document where programs fall short. Their recommendations often determine whether programs get new funding.

Are You Mazimizing the Return on Investment of Your Accountability Reports? Two case studies are presented in this SARC Bite #20 newsletter. This case study provides evidence that marketing schools, even modestly, with SARC summaries can return a four dollars for every one dollar invested.

What is the Real Cost of Not Printing Your SARCs. This SARC Bite #17 newsletter looks at the cost of not reaching parents. The cost of your SARCs is really the cost per parent reached. When no one is reached, the cost is the highest.

This presentation by Steve Rees, president and publisher of School Wise Press, to a CSBA seminar in 2003 compared two approaches to SARCs. One is cost minimization. The other is cost-benefit maximization. The lowest cost route produces no gain, while the alternate route produces net income.

Fact sheet sample reports from School Wise Press. This annotated version of a one-page report about a school's vital signs can help you tell your school's stories.