Before Jason first began working at the school, he had regarded it as a struggling school without clear success. But Jason’s interview had surprised him. The school officials and personnel whom he met didn’t seem at all challenged or discouraged by the school’s lower public profile. Indeed, just the opposite: everyone inside the school seemed largely to regard the school as highly successful. And it didn’t take Jason long to see the same thing. Jason had been judging the school through an elitist lens, as worldly people generally judge things. But through a proper lens of student development, Jason could see how his new school was indeed a spectacular success, likely more so than the most elite of institutions.
Measures
School success can take several forms. Schools have different missions serving different student populations having different educational goals. Schools can prosper by properly defining success, aiming for the proper success measure, and then celebrating success when they achieve it. Get the wrong picture of your school’s success in your head, and your school will not succeed, or if it succeeds by your improper measure, it will have failed in its proper mission. On the other hand, schools don’t have to measure success in only one way. Schools can define, pursue, and celebrate several forms of success. Indeed, one form of success can spur and support another form of success within and across school programs. Schools do well to build success upon success. Sometimes, a school just needs a small victory in one area to gain the momentum, confidence, commitment, insight, and resources for other successes. Focusing on wins can be a good strategy. Pursuing wins can be even better. Consider some of the following success measures when evaluating your own school’s goals, measures, and wins.
Numbers
Numbers are, well, easy to count. And things that you can count make ready measures for success. Schools have lots of things that they can count. Indeed, schools do lots of counting. Applications, admissions, admissions as a percentage of applications, enrollment, attrition, retention, graduates, and graduation rate are all common school measures. Indeed, schools measure their applicants by standardized test score averages and medians, and their prior-school grade-point averages. Schools also measure their admittees by the same measures. Schools measure their current students on cumulative grade-point averages, grade-point averages in the current term, credits attempted versus credits completed, and other measures. These and other measures contribute to school rankings, for which schools plan and compete, and successes they advertise and celebrate. Countable things make convenient success measures. Counting academic success makes good school sense. Celebrate your school’s academic numbers and ranking, if numbers are your school’s strength.
Advancement
School advancement, including both moving up from grade to grade or college year to college year and reaching graduation, is another key success metric for schools. Schools rightly celebrate grade advancement and graduations. Accreditors closely monitor attrition, retention, advancement, and graduation rates. Schools at all levels with poor advancement rates can lose accreditation, suffer rankings declines, and face public scorn and enrollment declines as a failing school. Accreditors, education media, and competitor schools ensure that level of accountability for failing schools. Schools, in other words, must respond to market pressures on academic and advancement measures. Accreditation standards intend markets to promote school performance. If your school has strong advancement and graduation rates, you and your school have every good reason to publicize and celebrate that school success.
Placement
Schools also celebrate graduate placement measures. Placement refers to graduates getting jobs. In vocational, undergraduate, and graduate programs, graduates getting jobs can be a sound measure, indeed a very good or even the best measure. Accreditors require undergraduate and graduate schools to count and report placement rates, and may withhold accreditation from schools that fail to meet placement-rate accreditation standards. Attending a vocational school that can’t get you a job when you graduate doesn’t make much sense, and so accreditors require schools to report placement rates. For-profit and private non-profit schools have also faced regulatory action affecting their students’ ability to use federal student loan programs to pay for their vocational schooling, because of poor retention, graduation, and placement rates. Celebrate placement success, both by the numbers and individually.
Admissions
Schools can also celebrate their graduates’ admission to other schools after graduation. Some high school and prep academy programs, for instance, plan their programs as college feeders and publicize their college admissions successes. A school that regularly feeds graduates into Ivy League schools or other premier undergraduate programs can attract parents and students for that reason alone. Education is progressive. Schools prepare students for more schooling. Schools have every good reason to celebrate their college-prep success. Undergraduate institutions also seek to prepare their students for graduate and professional school admissions and success. The undergraduate school that regularly gets its graduates into premier medical schools, law schools, and other professional and graduate programs can attract students on that basis alone. Those schools have good reasons to celebrate graduate school admissions successes, both by the numbers and individually.
Skills
Although the measurement can be more difficult and idiosyncratic, schools at all secondary, undergraduate, and graduate school levels can also measure success by the skills they foster in their students. One way that schools measure and tout their skills success is through inter-school skills competitions. Schools don’t have to be academically elite based on broad academic profiles and averages, to claim national and international success. A single competition-team win at a major inter-school competition, over academically elite schools, can catapult a non-elite school to prominence for skills-instruction success. Go beat Stanford or Harvard, or an elite prep academy, in a science, medicine, or engineering competition, and your school can claim skills success. Consider helping your school aim for skills success, if your school already has a strong skills program or the resources and inspiration to develop it.
Health
Although it can be even harder to measure, schools can also celebrate the physical, mental, emotional, social, moral, and other development of their students, as a heartening form of student success. Schools gather and analyze statistics on their students’ mental health. They also track data on drug and alcohol abuse, sexual assault and disease, dating and domestic violence, and other health measures. They also survey students on health and lifestyle questions. Analysis of health data can produce encouraging measures, especially when compared to other schools. Students may or may not respond to school publication of encouraging health data. But students do respond to school publications depicting healthy campus living and lifestyles, supported by a health-conscious campus culture and health and recreation facilities. Some students, and their parents, want little more from a school than that it be a stable, safe, secure, and healthy environment for continued maturation and development. Schools can take appropriate pride in their ability to promote and maintain that environment.
Professional
Schools can also celebrate their graduates’ vocational and professional successes, as another form of school success. Examine the alumni publications of any school, especially at the higher education and graduate school levels, and you’ll see the just pride that schools take in their graduates’ accomplishments. Those publications feature stories of the fascinating and inspired work that the school’s alumni do, not just to encourage the alumni but to recruit and inspire students and to lift the spirit and profile of the whole school. When your school graduates a U.S. president or Supreme Court justice, or the inventor of a lifesaving medical technology, the whole school takes heart from that alumni success. Identify the professional, vocational, and other career successes of your school’s alumni, to hearten your whole school community and promote your school.
Celebration
How your school celebrates student successes can also make an impact. Student honor rolls and dean’s lists are a traditional form of academic celebration, along with valedictorians and salutatorians. Give students that recognition on transcripts and in graduation ceremonies. They earned it. But recognize other student successes in other ways, too. Display bulletin boards and webpages showing student competition, relational, leadership, and volunteer participation, as other forms of success. Feature in student publications interviews of students of no particular academic or leadership note, who have nonetheless succeeded in navigating the school’s programs in healthy and positive ways, with good experiences and better relationships. Encourage and support students when they plan their own peer-to-peer celebrations, whether birthdays, engagements, marriages, pregnancy and childbirth, medical recoveries, completion of military service, and other milestones. Help your school’s students treat one another as valued members of a close-knit and supportive community.
Faculty
Schools can also justly and usefully celebrate faculty successes. Certainly, faculty appointments, grants, awards, publications, and external recognition as field leaders are appropriate faculty accomplishments for a school to acknowledge and celebrate. If one of your school’s faculty members wins a Nobel prize in science or literature, for instance, or any lesser prize, help your school celebrate it. Alumni publications, school advertising, and school webpages are all sound places to tout faculty accomplishments. Recognizing faculty accomplishments and milestones in service and seniority in front of other faculty members is also appropriate, to let the full faculty know that the school appreciates and values them. The same can be true for school administrators and staff members. Celebrations of that sort can strengthen the commitment, morale, and loyalty of school personnel, while leavening and humanizing the usually rigorous and often stressful academic environment.
Reflection
What are your school’s primary success measures? What success measures do you sense that students care about most? What success measures do you sense that the school board and leader care about most? How does your school rank on academic profile, retention, and graduation measures? How does your school perform on college admissions, graduate admissions, and job-placement measures? Does your school support skills competitions and other ways to test and prove alternative forms of academic success? How healthy are your school’s students, and by what measures? Does your school count and tout the health and morals of its students as a success? Who are your school’s most-prominent and successful alumni? How does your school celebrate alumni success? Does your school adequately recognize faculty and staff milestones and accomplishments? In what ways does your school help students celebrate their own successes?
Key Points
Schools have several ways to measure and celebrate student success.
Accreditors require publication of academic data as success measures.
Aim for and celebrate strong advancement and graduation rates.
Aim for and celebrate favorable graduate job-placement rates.
Program to help students gain college and graduate admissions.
Also celebrate co-curricular skills competitions successes.
Measure student health data, and advertise healthy lifestyle success.
Publicize and celebrate alumni career accomplishments and success.
Celebrate faculty and staff milestones and accomplishments.
Employ multiple ways to recognize and applaud varied student success.