Educational Administration Quarterly Heck / EXAMINING THE IMPACT OF SCHOOL QUALITY Examining the Impact of School Quality on School Outcomes and Improvement: A Value-Added Approach

There has been a recent state-level emphasis on monitoring student outcomes to develop comprehensive school accountability. Such monitoring systems can include content standards and benchmarks to measure progress, statewide assessment instruments, and school report card data that policy makers, school personnel, and parents can also use to compare schools. To be fair, school comparisons should somehow take into consider-ation differences in communities and the background characteristics of students who live in these communities. Little previous research has examined what report card informa-tion might be used to identify school indicators that are related to student achievement and improvement gains across school settings with diverse student composition. The purpose of this study is to present an approach to statewide school comparison that focuses on the value-added effects of report card indicators of elementary schools ’ edu-cational environments on school achievement and school improvement after making school-level adjustments for student differences. Current state legislative policies across the United States aimed at strengthening educational accountability through standards-based practice, parent choice, and charter schools emphasize policy-makers ’ beliefs that schools may be evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in educating their students. School personnel are being impelled to change the status quo of professional practice in various ways with the expectation that they will be accountable for improving student performance. School effectiveness research, in part, has been a driving force behind such efforts, determining Author’s Note: The author is grateful to Vicki Rosser, Scott Thomas, Susan Wiley, Liang Zhang, the editors of the journal, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on ear-lier drafts of the manuscript