Like many other states, South Carolina has invested money, time, and resources to improve its most academically vulnerable schools. The Education Accountability Act of 1998 required that South Carolina develop and implement a series of strategies to support school improvement. Over the past four years, the External Review Team (ERT) Program has served as one of South Carolina’s key activities for lifting school performance. Through the ERT program, schools identified as underperforming receive visits from teams of education experts who issue pointed recommendations to implement. Schools are then provided with the resources they need to act on the ERT recommendations. Now that successive cohorts of underperforming schools have had the opportunity to work with and apply recommendations from the ERTs, some schools have demonstrated noticeable gains in student improvement while others continue to lag behind. Hezel Associates has been engaged to evaluate the ERT program, which includes:
• A review process in which an external team of educators conducts interviews, classroom observations, and a document review to diagnose areas of needed improvement
• The development and revision of a school’s improvement plan, which enables school administrators and faculty to critically examine the school’s strengths and weaknesses within a comprehensive framework of criteria for improvement
• Targeted technical assistance based on the recommendations made by the ERT, including funding for on-site teacher specialists and for retraining teachers and/or administrators
• A state-level financial commitment to school improvement: $118 million for supporting the general Education Accountability Act’s programs and another $83 million committed to general instructional improvement
• An increased threshold for designating a school as having unsatisfactory
performance, which encourages and rewards continuous improvement in South
Carolina’s public schools