KEYS Users Speak Up

KEYS & Continuous School Improvement

KEYS Online

For almost two decades, the National Education Association has been supporting a national initiative to foster school improvement called Keys to Excellence for Your School (KEYS). KEYS uses an extensive self-administered survey of school staff and parents to identify the conditions in their school that research has shown influence teaching and learning. The KEYS process, which has been validated in studies of student achievement, has been used to improve thousands of schools throughout the United States.

To help you learn more about KEYS, we have set up several demonstration schools. Eastern Elementary School has just signed up for KEYS and is entering basic demographic information. Eastern High School is collecting surveys. You can preview the survey that staff, community members and parents fill out. Eastern Middle School has completed the survey and you can see the detailed results report for the staff, family and comunity surveys.

Download a copy of the the staff, family and comunity surveys.

If several schools in a district are participating, a "District Facilitator" can produce a comparison report across schools.

Configuring and Accessing the District Report (2.5MB PowerPoint)
Configuring and Accessing the District Report (1.8MB PDF)

Continuous School Improvement

KEYS (version 2.0) identifies conditions in schools that need improvement, making it part of a broader change process. Schools have made increasing use of student performance data to give direction to school improvement. The NEA assists schools and districts in using the KEYS data within the context of continuous school improvement.

For a detailed description of the KEYS-CSI connection, see the KEYS-CSI Model.