The Design and Characteristics of School Improvement Plan Templates
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Bryan A. VanGronigen, University of Delaware; Coby V. Meyers, University of Virginia; Rachel Antwi Adjei, University of Delaware; Latrice Marianno, University of Delaware; Linda Charris, University of Delaware
Version: View help for Version V1
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Project Citation:
VanGronigen, Bryan A., Meyers, Coby V., Adjei, Rachel Antwi, Marianno, Latrice, and Charris, Linda. The Design and Characteristics of School Improvement Plan Templates. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2023-03-16. https://doi.org/10.3886/E186721V1
Project Description
Summary:
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Resources for school improvement efforts, such as school improvement plan (SIP) templates, can espouse governmental entities’ perspectives, requirements, and recommendations of the school improvement planning process. These resources, in turn, can influence how educators enact school improvement efforts generally and the school improvement planning process specifically. In this exploratory qualitative study, we leveraged a conventional content analysis to rigorously examine SIP templates used by schools in the United States before and after the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. We were particularly interested in learning how SIP templates espoused the school improvement planning process. Findings suggest that SIP templates focused more on developing SIPs than implementing SIPs, raising concerns about SIPs continuing to be enacted out of compliance rather than as a mechanism for spurring and sustaining improvement efforts in schools.
Scope of Project
Subject Terms:
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school improvement planning;
school improvement plan;
state education agency;
template;
theory-of-action
Geographic Coverage:
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United States
Time Period(s):
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1/1/2010 – 1/1/2022
Collection Date(s):
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1/1/2020 – 1/1/2022
Methodology
Sampling:
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The purposes of the present study were to better understand the characteristics of SIP templates and how those templates espoused the SIP development and implementation process. To accomplish these purposes, we conducted a conventional content analysis (Krippendorf, 2004), which is an apropos qualitative approach when not much is known about the phenomenon of interest (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005).
To provide a broad understanding of SIP templates, we used a complete target population sampling method, which Patton (2002) recommends when research purposes call for learning about all participants in a group of interest. We considered each U.S. state to be a separate participant (N = 50).
Data Source:
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The goal of our data collection efforts was to gather at least two documents from each state: (a) a blank SIP template or completed SIP from before the 2015-2016 school year, and (b) a blank SIP template or completed SIP from after the 2018-2019 school year. We referred to the first set of documents as “the prior era” and the second set as “the current era.” ESSA’s passage in December 2015 provided the time point to distinguish between the prior and current eras.
To start data collection efforts, three research team members visited each SEA’s website to identify SIP-related webpages. Some SEA websites like Florida’s had a publicly available database of all SIPs while other SEA websites included scant information about SIPs. In these latter cases, we performed additional website searches within and outside the SEA’s website to identify prior and current era SIPs, such as navigating through school district websites. These additional searches failed in 12 states, so one research team member emailed those states’ SEA improvement unit staff members to ask for needed documents. After attempts to contact all 50 states, we ultimately secured 44 SIPs from the prior era and 48 SIPs from the current era (See Table 3 in the findings section for the full list). These 92 documents served as our final data sources. While we intentionally selected SIPs at random, no SIPs were specifically Title I schoolwide plans because the U.S. federal government sets the guidelines for those plans (USED, 2016). We were interested only in SIP templates that were not mandated by the U.S. federal government (i.e., developed and/or shared by SEAs).
Collection Mode(s):
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other;
web scraping
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