The New Hampshire Department of Education (NHED) designed a school accountability system in 2016 and 2017 to meet the requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015. The system was implemented in 2017 and 2018 for the first time and has been operating continuously since then, except for 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. NHED thought this represented a good time to evaluate the degree to which the system works as intended.
School accountability systems rarely undergo formative or summative evaluation studies, at least not comprehensively. This report contains a summary of work conducted in 2024 by the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, Inc. to provide NHED with a formative evaluation, including recommendations for continuous improvement of the state’s school identification and support system. The work used data from the state’s accountability system from 2018 to 2023.
Four evaluation questions guided this project:
- Is the accountability system identifying the “right schools” for federal designations?
- Are 1003/CSI funds adequate for establishing school improvement programs?
- Is the accountability system producing useful information for improving schools?
- Do identified schools improve, and do they do so faster than non-identified schools?
We focused on the Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) designations in addressing each research question. To the extent possible, we explored the implications of these questions for Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) and Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI).
