Bellwether’s School Quality Framework

About Bellwether

Bellwether is a national nonprofit that works to ensure young people — especially those furthest from opportunity — achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Our vision is that all young people have access to an excellent education and live lives filled with opportunity.

We partner with mission-driven leaders and organizations to deepen and accelerate their impact supporting them as they navigate tough decisions, informing the field with clear insights and bold ideas, and bringing leaders together to learn, connect, and drive change. Our work spans early childhood through postsecondary and career pathways, and aims to develop and amplify the insights, innovations, and ideas necessary to advance educational options in this country.

Our experts have extensive experience leading and sustaining great schools, districts, and charter networks. We’re here to help achieve your school system’s goals and expand your impact.

Our School Quality Framework (SQF)

Over the past decade, Bellwether’s School Health Assessment (SHA) has been a trusted tool for diagnosing K-12 school quality, elevating areas of strength and opportunity, and guiding strategic planning efforts in schools, networks, and districts across the country. We’ve used it in partnership with hundreds of school leaders, helping turn insight into action to build healthier, more effective, and more inclusive learning environments for students. But a lot has changed since the SHA was first developed. Today’s challenges facing schools have grown more complex, and our collective understanding of what excellence looks like — and what it takes to achieve it — has deepened. What’s more, schools face compounding external pressures, from tightening budgets to changing enrollment patterns.

That’s why we’re proud to introduce Bellwether’s School Quality Framework (SQF), which builds on the best of the SHA while incorporating years of cross-sector learning, field-tested tools, and evolving research. The SQF is a comprehensive vision of school, network, and district excellence, and a tool to evaluate, reflect, and improve educational systems in service of that vision and the students for whom it’s designed.

Within this framework, we define “quality” as a school’s ability to deliver increasingly strong academic, social-emotional, and life outcomes for every student it serves. We recognize that high-quality schools come in many forms; the SQF is designed to distill what these schools have in common — regardless of model, type, or approach — and to offer an entry point and a clear path for rapid, sustained improvement in any school context.

We use the SQF for three interconnected purposes:

• To develop a shared understanding of the current state of schools, networks, and/or districts relative to an absolute bar of quality.
• To identify the core areas of strength and opportunity in schools and systems.
• To inform smart, targeted strategic planning, improvement cycles, and implementation efforts.