Why it Matters
Effective performance management improves an education program’s overall outcomes by serving as a means through which LEAs can:
Monitor progress towards goals.
Provide feedback to education program leaders. and
Support continuous improvement and adjust education program activities where the education program is not on track to meet its goals.
A Collaborative Approach to Continuous Improvement
Traditional performance management might focus on ensuring compliance. However, LEAs can design performance management systems and processes that prioritize collaboration between the LEA and external providers and ensure a focus on learning and continuous improvement.
To develop a collaborative approach to performance management that focuses on continuous improvement, LEAs can:
Set expectations in the RFP about performance management and data that will be collected.
Ensure there will be regular communication points with internal staff, external providers and other key stakeholders throughout the education program.
Analyze performance data throughout the education program.
Identify trends and challenges early on and in real-time.
Rapidly and continually problem-solve and course correct, with the partnership of internal staff and external providers.
Identify opportunities to rethink and improve the education program on a long-term basis.
When designed with continuous improvement in mind, performance management allows LEAs to identify early on where a program could be improved and course correct before the program concludes. In this way, performance management can help ensure that a program is successful, rather than find out after the fact whether or not it was successful.
Performance Management Communication and Routines
LEAs can be strategic in how they collect performance measures; they can also be strategic in how that data is shared with leadership teams and other key stakeholders. While dashboards are not the only way to share performance measure data, GPL’s Five Elements to Include in Every Performance Dashboard includes insights relevant to any strategy for communicating about performance measures.
LEAs can also establish performance management routines to ensure that the appropriate LEA leaders and educators are using performance management data to monitor progress and course-correct.
Additional Resources on Continuous Improvement Cycles
The Institute for Education Science’s Continuous Improvement in Education: A Toolkit for Schools and Districts describes the value of incorporating data into a plan-do-study-act cycle.
A key component of performance management is establishing performance measures, or the key data points that indicate how an education program is working, in relation to its goals. LEAs’ performance management plans should include performance measures that tell them whether and to what degree the education program is achieving the desired outcomes the LEA identified as priorities for the education program.
The federal Performance Improvement Council’s (PIC) resource on Performance Measures Basics describes seven key considerations when developing performance measures.
Meaningful: They reflect desired outcomes and provide useful information to enable decision making.
Measurable: They are quantifiable and objective. Data is available and can be collected in a cost-effective manner.
Responsive: They link to inputs that can be controlled and adjusted, and data can be compared over time to reveal trends.
Easy to Understand: They are intuitive and easily digested by their users without much explanation.
Incentivize the Right Behavior: They prompt organizations and individuals to take actions that are consistent with long-term goals.
Less is More: They are limited in scope and focused on what an organization specifically wants to improve. Trying to measure everything can distract attention from what is most important.
Visible and Transparent: Everyone involved is aware of the measures and held accountable to them. Such transparency helps everyone keep their eye on the ball and understand their contribution to the overarching performance of the organization.
The federal Performance Improvement Council also identifies four common mistakes in developing performance measures.
Too many measures: Organizations that measure everything may end up understanding nothing because insights get diluted in the noise.
Misaligned to strategic priorities: Organizations that cannot link their performance “gauges” to their final destination are far less likely to arrive at their destination on time, intact, and on budget.
Nothing under the hood: Many organizations create measures without corresponding data collection, calculation, or reporting methodologies. These methodologies are essential for implementing the measures successfully.
Unrealistic: Sometimes the most well-intended measures are simply outside the possible scope of data collection. Beware of measures that sound great in theory but are much harder to capture in practice
Building Evidence Through Evaluation is an evidence-based spending strategy that allows LEAs to answer the question "Are our investments making the impacts we seek?".
An education program’s evaluation plan and performance management plan may not completely overlap; however, LEAs can strive for coherence across the two plans, so that the performance management plan is generating information that can be used in service of both
and
evaluation plans.
Additionally, if an LEA is using outcomes-based contracting, they will want to ensure that their performance management and evaluation plans are designed in alignment with their outcomes-based contract. This means that the data and measures that undergird their performance management and evaluation plans should also help them fulfill the requirements of the contract and make appropriate payments to their providers.
Questions LEA leaders can ask themselves as they consider coherence include:
In what ways are the purposes behind the performance management and evaluation plans similar and in what ways are they different? What do the similarities and differences suggest about the ways in which you can align the implementation of each?
Will internal staff and external providers be asked to collect and report different data points for the performance plan and education program evaluation? If so, what is the rationale for the difference and are there ways to ensure that the data that internal staff and external providers are collecting can be used for both purposes?
If the LEA is working with an external evaluator, are the proper agreements in place to allow for data-sharing? How will performance measure data that is collected via the LEA’s data management system be made available to the education program evaluator? Is the data being collected in a way that the LEA and evaluators will be able to connect the performance measures data to data collected by the LEA in other systems?
Are the performance management and evaluation plan timelines aligned in ways that will benefit both?
If this procurement involves outcomes-based contracting, in what ways are the performance management and evaluation plans aligned with the outcomes-based contract invoicing plan? Will the data collected and analyzed as part of the performance management and evaluation plan be able to inform payments to the provider?