A Proven System for Improving Education

Our youth is our future

State Farm® has chosen to be an active partner with our educational communities. We support the improvement efforts underway that are realizing significant gains in academic achievement for all students.

Systemic Improvement
Systemic improvement initiatives are those programs and processes requiring longer periods of time and investment of resources to impact measurable student achievement. Initially, State Farm’s primary systemic improvement strategy was to support programs such as Baldrige in Education—a practice that helped schools use and implement continuous improvement strategies.

To comply with the student achievement measures enacted through the “No Child Left Behind” legislation, many educators are focused on closing the significant academic achievement gaps between student groups and have fewer resources available to implement new programs or processes such as Baldrige. As a result, the systemic improvement category has been broadened to include data management programs and processes to help educators learn to use data to drive decisions.

The National Center for Education Accountability (NCEA) is one data management partnership that meets the criteria for systemic improvement. NCEA’s focus is to improve state data collection on school performance. By doing so, parents, legislators, educators and community leaders can determine how their schools compare to other schools. NCEA has worked with states to improve the availability of school performance data to enable improved decision making on what is working to improve academic performance. It also identifies the practices that distinguish consistently high-performing schools from other schools with similar demographics but lower performance. NCEA disaggregates data by racial, economic and ethnic groups to help schools determine if they are successfully addressing the needs of all subgroups of students. Using data helps schools better understand where gaps exist and allows best practices to be shared.

Long-term, results-based improvement strategies that change school culture and improve teaching methods impacting how schools deliver education will be included in the systemic improvement category for funding.

For more information contact Carl Nelson.