At Arts & Letters, we are embarking on a month of preparation for our Quality Review. For those of you who do not know, theQuality Review stands next to the Progress Report Card, those notorious A-F grades that appear in the newspapers. These are the Department of Education's two most important measures of school success. While the Progress Reports mostly show a snapshot of a school's progress and performance on state tests, the Quality Review seeks to provide a more holistic view of a school.

In truth, it has taken a while for the DOE to settle on a "rubric" or measure, that encapsulates as well what a "well-developed" school should look like. Nationally, and even locally, departments of education have hesitated to declare the qualities of a good school, but the research is resoundingly clear, and the NYC Department of Education is taking a stand.<!--more-->

The Principal’s Guide to the Quality Review states that it intends to examine how the systems and structures of the school support student learning, by reviewing what is taught at all levels, how it is taught by the teachers and leadership, how information is shared between critical constituencies (parents, students, teachers), and how the teachers and the community work together to improve student learning and the school itself.

The review takes between 1.5 and 3 days, and in my experience, has depended a great deal on the reviewer's perspective. In my case, the two reviews that have been written about my school are as different as the reviewers -- all educators -- themselves. In addition, the reports, which are posted to the statisticspage of the school's portal, are somewhat unfriendly to non-educators. (The people in charge of this initiative say they are working on both of these issues.) The score the school receives is combined with other metrics, including the progress report and the Learning Environment Survey, and used to evaluate the principal's performance and the school's standing.

While preparing my staff for a month takes time away from the important initiatives that we have begun this year, the Quality Review (at its best) represents an important chance to hold ourselves up against researched and demonstrated best practices. For example, when we look at the sub-statement 1.1, which reads "Design engaging, rigorous and coherent curricula, including the Arts, for a variety of learners and aligned to key State standards," we will have to gather our curriculum and lesson plans, our team meeting notes, and ask ourselves whether our curriculum is engaging our students, whether it meets the needs of a variety of different types of learners, and whether it meets the state's requirements as well. And this is just one of the 20 sub-statements!

This self-scrutiny will extend to every part of the school, to our morning community meetings and our grade level teams, our mentoring program, and our intensive, after-school reading program.

I won't pretend: I want to do well on our Quality Review, as anyone would. And I remain optimistic that our reviewer will be able to see our strengths and challenges and conduct a serious, objective, and productive review. But just as we want our students to invest in learning because it is rigorous and exciting, rather than just to "make the grade," we want to make this process a productive one that pushes us to practice the important habit of reflection, regardless of the outcome.