Every program and every class is
your school should have a thorough assessment done before the end of the school
year. You may assess progress in any
given program using a nationally-normed test, a state test, a campus, or
teacher-made test, or a combination of these.
It doesn’t really matter what the process is. The bottom line, as far as grants go, is that
you have to know where your students started the year and how much progress
they’ve made during the course of the year. You can only do that by properly assessing each of your programs.
When you get the results from your
assessments, you should be able to quickly spot the problem areas in your
school. When you know those problems and
exactly how large they are, you can then begin to develop plans to eliminate or
remediate those problems. But, here’s the rub.
Even if you identify your problems, are you going to have the funds in
your budget to do the things you need to do to solve all of your problems? If you don’t, then you’re going to need to
apply for grant money.
When you start completing grant
applications, your assessments come into play again. On your application, you can show the grantor
how you determined that you had a problem and just how severe yours problem are. You then explain exactly what you need to do to
alleviate the problem and how their grant money will be used to make the needed
changes and improvements. If you don’t
have good, solid data from your assessment instrument, you end up talking in
generalities while your competitors will be using specifics.
Most grantors also require you to
include your assessment process in your grant proposal. They want to know where your students started,
how much growth you got using their grant funds, and the instrument you used to
determine this growth.
This whole funding, assessment, and
growth process is probably the closest a school will come to mirroring other
types of businesses. Using the proper
assessment tools, you can determine exactly how much money you spent to obtain
the months or years of growth you gained. Good programs make a profit (high growth on the part of students). Poor programs have a loss (little or no
progress for the money spent).
The reason I am mentioning
assessments again now is that as we close in on the end of the current school
year. Each of your programs should be
assessed properly. You should determine
exactly how much growth each student demonstrates. From these assessments you will get much
needed statistical information that you can use in a grant application, and you
will have a benchmark of exactly where students are at this point in the school
year.
Your assessments should be given toward
the end of the school year to allow as much growth to be demonstrated as
possible. It should not be so close to
the end of the year, however, that students cannot concentrate or do their best
on the assessment instrument.
Assessments are a vital part of any
grant program. Make sure that every
program in your school receives a proper assessment before you leave for the
summer.
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