Rhode Island’s Framework for Comprehensive School Improvement
The Rhode Island Framework for Comprehensive School Improvement offers guardrails to guide the complex work of school improvement. It offers a structure to local education agencies (LEAs) and school communities as they articulate a coherent strategy and explicit philosophy to organize the work of a school and its partners. For this reason, adopting a framework for school improvement is crucial for RIDE, but more importantly, for our local education agencies (LEAs), our communities, and most importantly, our schools—including the leaders, teachers, and students within them.
As such, the subsequent framework has been adopted by RIDE and the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education as a response to requests from our partners in the field that, while innovation and flexibility in this work are closely-held values, it would be helpful for the agency to articulate evidence-based essential elements related to school improvement. Thus, the Rhode Island Framework for Comprehensive School Improvement:
Purpose of a Comprehensive Needs Assessment
ESSA requires that all LEAs with CSI schools conduct school-level needs assessment(s) to determine the possible causes of low performance and identify strategies for remediation. The ultimate purpose of a needs assessment is to develop an informed, accurate understanding of the current conditions of teaching and learning, climate and culture, student, teacher, and community characteristics and behaviors, and LEA systems, all of which contribute to the educational effectiveness and student success in an identified school and LEA. The needs assessment will also allow all stakeholders to norm on their understanding of a school’s strengths and areas for improvement through their utilization of an objective, data-driven, process.
An effective needs assessment will examine indicators against a variety of data sources including long-term outcomes (lagging indicators), mid-term outcomes, (leading indicators) and evidence of processes and systems (implementation indicators), which taken together provide rich context for making judgements about a school’s current conditions. Additionally, a robust needs assessment will call for the analysis of many different sources of data including learning outcome data, perception data, demographic data, and data concerning school and system processes. A quality needs assessment will provide opportunities for users to triangulate these multiple sources of data and organize them to develop a coherent, robust understanding of a school’s current conditions.
Ideally, needs assessments selected by CSI schools/LEAs will be aligned to the Rhode Island Framework for Comprehensive School Improvement and to the Rhode Island Statewide Accountability System in order to align the findings of the needs assessment in the context of the state’s model for supporting and improving schools. However, a coherent and robust understanding of a school’s conditions is only the first step; an effective needs assessment must also ask users to prioritize areas of concern that are most likely to yield the greatest gains for students. This will inevitably require a measure of judgement from the users of the needs assessment and be made in a larger context of national, state, and local data, as well as stated goals and strategic priorities at all three of these levels.
Finally, once many sources of data are gathered, organized, analyzed, and prioritized, an effective needs assessment will ask users to develop hypotheses for the root causes of areas that emerged as in greatest need and with greatest potential for impact. These root causes, once identified, will form the basis of the next phase of school improvement: the selection of evidence-based interventions.
RIDE acknowledges that there are several tools that support a robust and in-depth needs assessment. In practice, ongoing analyses are needed to ensure that data supports causal inferences and that additional data is not needed to confirm findings. However, RIDE believes schools and LEAs will be well equipped to identify their greatest needs, their root causes, and strategies most likely to improve the conditions of teaching and learning at schools when the following are true:
- At each stage in the process, a well-rounded team of stakeholders (LEA, school educators and community advisory boards) are engaged as a collaborative team
- The collaborative team is presented with sufficient data on a broad range of research-validated indicators of school improvement
- The collaborative team leverages the Rhode Island Framework for Comprehensive School Improvement as an organizing theory for comprehensive improvement.
Selecting Comprehensive Needs Assessment Tools and Protocols
Every LEA with CSI schools and will be required to work with their identified schools and their respective CABs to conduct a needs assessment. This will require them to take the follow steps, described in greater detail below:
- Review and select a comprehensive needs assessment
Examples of strong comprehensive needs assessments include:
- Identify and gather data
- Present data to the collaborative team (school and CAB)
- Prioritize indicators for root cause analysis
The comprehensive needs assessment process described in the following chart is intended to serve as a model, aligned to Rhode Island’s school improvement framework, accountability system, and research on characteristics of improving schools. It provides educators and CABs (collectively referred to as the collaborative team) with indicators, or statements of fact, which research has shown are related to positive student and school outcomes. Other example needs assessments can be found on the Rhode Island Continuous School Improvement Resource Hub. Regardless of the particular needs assessment selected for a given school or set of schools, the following process should be followed to achieve the best understanding of current conditions of teaching and learning at the identified school its LEA.
| I. Review and Select Appropriate Needs Assessment |
LEAs should determine which needs assessment is best suited to evaluate the broad range of factors affecting the conditions of teaching and learning at their identified school(s) by looking for needs assessments that align to the RI Framework for Rapid and Sustainable School Improvement, provide a robust set of indicators across all domains of a school ecosystem, and align closely with the RI statewide system of accountability. |
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| II. Identify and Gather Data |
LEAs, particularly system-wide leaders and data experts, must read needs assessment indicators, identify relevant data sources, and gather available data. To the extent possible, for each indicator, LEAs should gather data that is triangulated from multiple sources and provides context in the form of local, state, or national averages, past performance, statewide or LEA goals or accountability benchmarks, etc. |
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| III. Present Data to Collaborative Team |
Once the data is assembled for each indicator, LEAs should present the data for each indicator to educators and community advisory board members at the identified school to explain what the data are showing, answering any outstanding questions, and respond to requests for further data, if available. The collaborative team should use this opportunity to record initial reactions to and analyses of the data. |
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| IV. Prioritize Indicators |
Finally, after going through an initial analysis of each indicator, the collaborative team should review each indicator a second time, in order to make joint determinations of relative levels of performance and importance. Ultimately, 3-5 priority indicators will be identified for root cause analysis. |
Additional Resources for Conducting Your Needs Assessment and Root Cause Analysis
Requirement for Evidence-Based Interventions in School Improvement
Interventions carried out and supported by funding from Title I, Section 1003 (School Improvement) must have strong, moderate, or promising evidence supporting them. All other activities under Titles I-IV may use all four tiers of evidence as support for selected interventions. The following resources can assist LEAs in locating research to provide a more rigorous evidence base for funding applications:
- The What Work Clearinghouse provides topical practice guides grounded in research as well as reviews of individual studies.
- Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.
- ERIC is an internet-based digital library of education research and information sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the USDOE. ERIC provides access to bibliographic records of journal and non-journal literature from 1966 to the present.
Additional details on the federal grants requiring evidence-based support can be found in the comparison chart, as well as at Results For America. Finally, please refer to the following:
Additional Resources
Grant Funding
1003 Funding for School Improvement Under ESSA
The following chart outlines the five new streams of funding for school improvement that are made available to schools under ESSA.
| Grant Type |
Formula or Competitive |
Award Period |
Use of Funds |
Eligibility |
Total Funding Available |
Estimated Award Size |
| School Improvement: Support |
Formula |
2 to 4 years |
Evidence-based school improvement activities as outlined in an approved school improvement plan. |
CSI |
$1,305,834 reserved by formula. |
$103/student at each identified school |
| School Improvement: Innovation |
Competitive |
1 to 2 years |
Innovative, evidence-based, novel strategies or initiatives intended to augment school improvement interventions. |
CSI, ATSI/TSI |
Up to $2,210,879.80 + any unused support funds, to be divided upon all competitive funding streams. |
$10,000 - $100,000 per school across all streams |
| School Improvement: Dissemination |
Competitive |
1 to 2 years |
Disseminating proven practices from any LEA or education service provider into schools identified as in need of Comprehensive Support and Improvement. |
CSI |
| School Redesign: Planning |
Competitive |
1 year |
Incubating or investigating school redesign models or school turnaround leadership. |
CSI |
| School Redesign: Implementation |
Competitive |
1 to 4 years |
Implementation of an approved school redesign models to improve performance at a chronically low performing school identified for additional state intervention. |
CSI |
Further guidance on the specific uses of the funds, application format and model responses can be located within the Practitioners’ Guide to School Improvement pages 42-74. Download an editable version of the Comprehensive Funding Application. As noted within the linked materials, all applications for funding are due to RIDE no later than May 15, 2019.
School Improvement Launch Mini Grant RFP
As the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) supports districts and schools to transition to school improvement processes governed by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), one-time, non-renewable, small-dollar mini grants of up to $20,000 will be available to support a wide variety of activities during this transition period.
Complete RFPs for Launch Mini Grants will be accepted by RIDE on a rolling deadline, up until February 25, 2019 and can be submitted digitally via email to Krystafer.Redden@ride.ri.gov and Chiara.Deltito@ride.ri.gov.
School Improvement Bridge Grants
As the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) seeks to transition to school improvement processes governed by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), one-time, pro-rated, non-renewable formula-based funds will be offered to schools that were formerly identified as either Priority or Focus under the previous RI State Accountability System, but are now no longer identified.
Complete RFPs for Bridge Grants will be accepted by RIDE on a rolling deadline, up until March 15, 2019 and can be submitted digitally via email to SchoolImprovement@ride.ri.gov.
Additional Resources