Step 7: Define Evaluation Criteria

At the close of a school year and in preparation for another, the school improvement team should be prepared to evaluate the success of its improvement efforts. If there is any area of goal setting that gets "short-shrift," it is building an evaluation plan from the start. It is one thing to set goals, it is quite another to deliberately evaluate success against the initial goal. The evaluation plan will follow as each strategy is developed in a measurable way. School improvement team members should discuss each strategy and identify the measures that will be used to examine to what degree the strategy was successful.

Evaluation criteria may consist of test scores, attendance count, records of meetings held, actions accomplished, observations, survey tabulations, and a variety of other measures.