2. What is the race and ethnic makeup of the people living in the neighborhood where the school is located? Are they rich, poor, or middle class? Is there any industry in the area? What kind of houses do people live in? Are the streets paved? Are there sidewalks for the children? 3. Are people moving into or out of the neighborhood? Why?

4. Are any community agencies in this neighborhood working in the area of education?

5. How well represented are the various racial and ethnic groups living in this neighborhood in local government, school boards, and parent advisory committees?

6. To what degree does the school work with the community.

II. The School and Its Characteristics
Kinds of information to be sought:

1. What is the makeup of the faculty by race, ethnic orgin, and sex? Of the administrators? Of secretaries and other office workers? Of all other "blue-collar" employees?

2. Is there any pattern to the school's employment policies? To the school district's?

3. Are there any signs of racial or cultural tension between the students? Between teachers? Between students and teachers?

4. What are the attitudes of the teachers working in the school?

5. Does the school have any formal community?

III. The School and Its Educational Program
Kinds of information to be sought:

1. Are the students getting the type of education
they need to find a job? To get into college?
2. Are the counseling services available
adequate to meet the needs of the students?
3. Are students of one racial, ethnic, or sex
group concentrated in vocational classes? In
classes preparing students for college? In EMR
classes?

4. What is the makeup of dropouts and withdrawals by race, ethnic origin, and sex? Of suspended students? Of expelled students?

5. What is the dropout rate for the school? For the district?

6. How much involvement of minority students is there in extracurricular activities?

7. How new and in what general conditions are the school buildings and facilities?

IV. The Involvement of Parents
Kinds of information to be sought:

1. What is the makeup of the school board by race, ethnic orgin, and sex?

2. To what degree are parents actively involved in school organizations and advisory groups? 3. Are parents involved in the actual operation of the school? (Example: Doing volunteer work in the classroom.)

4. Do parents have difficulties when they try to see the teachers? The administrators?

5. What is the degree of parental involvement in federally-funded programs? How are members of these advisory committees chosen?

The kinds of data or information to be collected may be either fact or opinion or both. However, to accumulate the right kind of information you may want to establish a set of priority or key questions outlining in great detail the areas you want to investigate and evaluate.

Equally important is determining the sources from which the data will be obtained. Careful attention should be directed toward selecting the data source or sources. The reason for this emphasis is that there are usually many different sources available for gathering similar kinds of information. Consequently, it is important that you and the committee design a data-gathering plan that specifies these sources before actually going out to collect it.

To gather this data, a number of existing sources are usually readily available. For example:

1. You can examine school records, test profiles of the school, annual reports, minutes of school board meetings, and any special reports that may have been prepared by the target school, the district, or State education agency.

2. You can personally interview teachers, students, school administrators, and other parents. 3. You can mail out questionnaires to students, parents, teachers, and school administrators requesting certain kinds of information.

4. You can make onsite visits to the school. 5. You can use the local library to get social and economic data for the community.

In addition to these sources, the administrative staff of each school district is an excellent source of information. The size of the district usually will dictate staff size and the types of responsibilities staff members assume. In general, various people

on the school's administrative staff will have important information at their disposal. The important thing here is to seek out the right people. An organizational chart of the school and perhaps having someone on the evaluation committee who is knowledgeable about school operations will be helpful.

Also, no evaluation can overlook the importance of teachers. There are several ways they can contribute to the evaluation. First, teachers can report their views of students' perceptions of the school's program. Though teacher reports should not be taken as conclusive evidence of the students' views, they are excellent indicators of the way teachers see their students, a perspective that usually influences the teachers' own approaches to the classroom environment. Second, teachers can report the academic achievement levels of students. Third, teachers are in a good position to report on curricular emphasis.

All of these approaches are valid in terms of getting information. The important thing to remember is that, when determining the items to be evaluated and the kinds of data to be sought, you should:

1. Carefully plan and outline the areas of concern before the evaluation effort is initiated. 2. Carefully phrase the priority or key questions to make sure they are directed to specific issues. 3. Have a good idea of the overall organization of the school.

Carrying through the

Evaluation-Collecting the Data

Step 5 involves the actual collection of data. At this point, the committee should have established the objectives of the evaluation effort, the details of the work to be done, the kinds of information needed, the time and resources required to do the job, and assigned specific members of the committee the responsibility for seeing that the essential action steps are accomplished within the time available.

The evaluation checklist in appendix C is designed to provide you with a comprehensive instrument for evaluating the school. However, it should be emphasized that the checklist presented here is only a suggested format and that your committee may want to develop its own evaluation instrument to make it more relevant to your needs.

Before beginning the actual evaluation effort, three things should be done by the committee:

1. Review the priority questions and evaluation checklist.

2. As indicated earlier, too much or too little data may handicap the prospects of a successful evaluation. To avoid this problem, the committee should carefully consider each data source and take steps to reduce overlapping questions. 3. The committee should also carefully review its methodology for collecting the necessary information.

Before visiting the school, members of the evaluation committee should study this handbook carefully. Also, members of the committee should familiarize themselves with the issues at hand, the kinds of information needed, and the objectives of the evaluation. In addition, committee members should begin to familiarize themselves with any material that may have been supplied by the school.

The role of the chairperson is extremely important in this phase. The success of the evaluation in accomplishing its objectives depends to a large extent on the chairperson's attention to details, organization of the committee's work, and relationship with the school in question.

The process of collecting the data is perhaps the most crucial element in the whole evaluation. To expedite this process, it is important that you develop an effective strategy. Below is a format or approach you may want to use in setting up the data collection effort.

1. The chairperson should first contact the principal of the school, indicating to that person the committee's intent to evaluate the school. At the same time, the chairperson should also arrange to visit the school before the evaluation to meet key members of the staff and perhaps the entire faculty in order to familiarize himself or herself with the school, to answer questions from the faculty, and to begin preliminary planning of the evaluation with the principal and his or her designated staff.

2. A time should then be arranged with the principal to allow the committee to visit the school. To assure complete coverage, a schedule should be prepared before the visit that provides ample time for the committee to:

(a) meet with the head of the school and key
members of the staff to discuss programs and
policies of the school;

(b) allow individual committee members or
small groups to visit classes and talk with
members of the faculty, staff, and students;
(c) see either individually or as a committee
such parts of the school's physical plant as
seems necessary;

(d) meet with other parents and community
groups to discuss the school's program and
response to the total community; and,

(e) meet as a committee at the close of the visit to review individual and group findings and determine if additional information will be needed to complete the evaluation. 3. After you have determined that all of the necessary information has been gathered, the committee should begin working out the format and emphasis of the evaluation report. To speed up this process, the committee should meet shortly after the evaluation visit has been completed to review the data, discuss the preliminary findings and observations, and begin formulating recommendations.

It is important that the evaluation visit of the committee be done in a professional manner. Members should observe, visit, and inquire for the purpose of getting as comprehensive a view of the work of the school as is possible in the limited time available. Their attitude should encourage free discussion of the work of the school among staff members. School officials and teachers should be given an opportunity to explain fully what they are doing. Individual members of the evaluation committee should avoid making criticisms or suggestions to members of the school staff during the visit. All such suggestions should be made after discussion by the committee and should be the result of committee action rather than individual action.

The evaluation is an effort to gain information that will lead the committee to identify problem areas and needs for the purpose of bringing them before the decisionmakers so that appropriate and necessary action can be taken. Information gathering, however, should not become an end in itself. Getting the information is only part of the job.

Another caution: The committee must avoid such a comprehensive and detailed effort that the

cost and time commitments become excessive. Of course, each committee must define its own effort. However, it is recommended that the entire evaluation effort from initial conception to the development of the report be compressed into a few weeks and that emphasis be placed on the utilization of existing information where it is available.

Figure 8 shows the steps involved in the evaluation process. It also suggests a general time framework to accomplish each of the steps. It does not, however, take into consideration a followup phase.

As indicated earlier, the evaluation effort should be carried out through the use of subcommittees. Each of the subcommittees will be responsible for a general area with overall direction and coordination being handled by the executive committee.

Members of a subcommittee responsible for a certain area should plan their visits so that each teacher is visited by at least two committee members at different times for approximately a class period each. Care should be taken that all the different varieties of work in terms of content, level of difficulty, special objectives, sequence, and similar factors are observed. Also, it is important that these subcommittees receive prior approval from the school's principal to enter classrooms. Members of these evaluation subcommittees should enter classes unannounced, avoid participation in class activities, defer making notes until after leaving the classroom, and leave with a minimum of disturbance. If the work of the class is obviously to be continued in much the same form for the entire period, the observer may leave after a short visit and return to observe another class.

At the conclusion of their visits, each of the subcommittees should prepare a written report that will be subject to approval by the full committee. Both good features and suggested changes should be included in these reports.

Time should be provided on the committee's schedule for each subcommittee responsible for a particular area to report to the entire committee at the end of the evaluation visit. Discussion of even the details of these reports should be encouraged as long as comments are constructive and special interests or prejudices are not exaggerated. The results and findings of the subcommittes are very

important and should be be carefully written, discussed, approved, and submitted to the chairperson of the evaluation committee before the subcommittee may consider that its work is completed.

Processing the Data

The sixth step calls for processing the data. This involves checking the data secured from the evaluation checklist and other sources for accuracy, assuring that it is complete, and putting it into a format that will be useful for those who will analyze it and prepare findings and recommendations.

Analyzing the Data

For all practical purposes, this step is the evaluation. Here the accumulated data, the subcommittee's reports, and responses to questionnaires are reviewed, analyzed, and compared. In this step the committee is mainly interested in looking at the information it has gathered to determine whether or not the school is meeting the needs of its students, their parents, and the total community. This activity also should reveal to what degree the school is meeting its own goals and objectives.

The priority questions established in step 4 are important because they will be helpful in proceeding with the needed analysis of the information obtained.

One way that you and the committee as a whole can proceed with analyzing the data is for the chairperson to assign each subcommittee a section of the report. Through individual and group discussion, each member can begin to look carefully at each of the elements covered in the evaluation effort. If necessary, experts can be called in to provide specialized technical assistance to help you in reviewing the data and perhaps offer suggestions on how to make the most effective use of this information.

Developing and Disseminating the
Evaluation Report

The eighth step is to establish the format and techniques for reporting the committee's findings and recommendations. Equally important is devising a strategy to maximize the impact of the report.

The report has a threefold purpose: