Once you complete the survey, NEA will provide you with your School Data Report. This report provides information about your school’s average scores and the degree of consensus among your colleagues. You will be able to compare your scores to the average of all schools in the KEYS 2.0 pilot and the score of the school in the 90th percentile of distribution.

Following are some general principles and specific suggestions to use with the survey results.

Differentiate between symptoms and root causes. The survey is a valuable tool to help a school community identify issues relevant to student achievement and possible problems. But even the best instrument cannot identify underlying root causes of problems. You, the school community, must read, analyze, and interpret the symptoms, then develop and test various hypotheses to determine root causes.

It is important to correctly frame and define the problem in order to implement the appropriate course of action.

Use multiple sources of data. Examine your data for each of the KEYS indicators in order to answer a critical question: Do the data represent an accurate picture of the school community? To answer this question, you may need to conduct focused interviews or small group discussions.

Move from data to information, understanding to knowledge. The KEYS data provide valuable opportunities for discourse and negotiations among school stakeholders to arrive at mutual understanding and construct new knowledge.

Involve the whole school community. The audience for the action guide includes anyone who has a stake in the school—the total school community. This would include teachers, education support professionals, school administrators, parents, community leaders, and representatives from community-based organizations. The guide will be especially helpful to those who will facilitate and implement the initiative.

Generating new ideas, creating shared understandings and knowledge, and securing commitments for continuous improvement involve social interactions and negotiations among stakeholders.

Take slow but steady steps. The road to continuous improvement has no end. Your initial act when you get your data may be to compare your school’s scores to other baselines. You may become overwhelmed by what seems to be a monumental task ahead. These feelings may also be exacerbated by the fact that KEYS is not a typical program that prescribes a set of activities that a school community must follow.

Celebrate successes and understand your strengths. Focus on your school’s strong areas as well as those that are of particular concern. Consideration of what makes a school successful on a particular set of indicators can help with addressing concerns.

Consider the following suggestions as you begin your assessment, planning, and implementation process: Look over the description of sustaining and deepening school improvement efforts (Key 7) for guidance on how to develop a cohesive school improvement plan.

• Examine the results of each key separately. Look for patterns of responses. Are all indicators within the key low? Do the responses suggest consensus or disagreement among respondents?
  
  
• Try to make sense of the data. Consider whether the results are consistent with what you know about the school. Do the data validate the group’s perceptions or are they surprising? Are team members in agreement or are there differences about what the data suggest?
  
  
• Carry out this preliminary analysis for all six keys. Look first for patterns within each key, then for patterns across the keys. Consider whether the scores suggest greater concerns on some keys rather than others.|
  
  
• Strive to reach consensus on one or two keys to examine and analyze in greater depth. Devise an action plan and appropriate interventions. It’s a good idea to begin with Keys 1 and 2. They can provide the framework for concerns in other keys. The description of sustaining and deepening school improvement efforts provides the rationale for addressing concerns that surface in Keys 1 and 2.
  
  
• You may find that while the team is focused on a specific key you may need to consider issues that another key addresses. A consideration of Key 4, professional development, for example, may warrant consideration of concepts defined in Key 6, curriculum and instruction. The crosskey relationships and the need for systemic integration will become evident as you and your colleagues become actively engaged in the school improvement effort.
  
  
• Once you focus on a single key, carefully read the section that relates to the key. The section includes a series of suggested activities that are appropriate to addressing issues related to the indicators.
  
  
• Initially, consider working on three or four indicators that are most critical to your circumstances.

The guide has five sections—About the Guide, the introduction, a series of seven sections—one for each of the keys, a section on sustaining and deepening school improvement efforts, and two appendices, which include a section on basic skills for facilitating school change. Throughout the guide are “success stories” from school districts that have successfully used the keys principles.

The data report provides an analysis of the surveys. See http://keysonline.org/DEMO/results/generalgraphs.html for an example of a data report. The first page displays your school’s demographic data.

There is a separate analysis for each key, along with a description and a series of scales that measure respondents’ perceptions on the indicators. The scores for each indicator are presented separately for all respondents completing the survey and for teacher respondents only. You may have requested separate analyses for other categories such as education support professionals, parents, or students if there are more than 20 respondents in the category.

The horizontal bar graphs in each section display your school’s scores for each indicator in comparison to two benchmarks drawn from the KEYS 2.0 research study. Each key indicator score represents a scaled average of respondents’ answers to survey questions that make up that specific indicator; 1,491 respondents—teachers, education support professionals, and administrators from 38 schools across the country participated in the study. NEA chose the schools—28 affiliated with NEA, 10 with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—from the National Council of Education Statistics database with the constraint that all NEA regions be represented and that the sample include elementary, middle, and high schools from urban, suburban, and rural districts.

One first benchmark represents the average indicator score of all schools participating in the research study. A second benchmark, serving as a target or goal, is the score of the school that falls at the 90th percentile of the distribution of schools. For each indicator, the horizontal bar represents one standard deviation above and below your school’s average score. This information is useful as a measure of consensus or agreement among respondents who complete the survey. The narrower the bar, the greater the agreement. Conversely, the wider the bar, the more disagreement among respondents. A high level of performance on all 42 indicators is essential for becoming a quality school. For each key, however, there are two or three indicators, highlighted by an asterisk, that, based on the research, are most positively correlated with high student achievement.

Do not be discouraged if you find that many of your scores are below the national norms and the average scores of those who participated in the survey. Consider whether your school’s scores might be the result of conditions or circumstances that are unique to your school. Continuous improvement means moving forward your school’s average scores for each indicator in a positive direction and reducing the variability among responses, that is, reaching a greater level of consensus among respondents.