A Study On The Evaluation Index System Of American Basic Education

Under the influence of educational evaluation reform in basic education, schools evaluation has accepted increasing attention because it plays a key role in ensuring the quality of education. And, as the foundation of schools evaluation, the evaluating standards (index systems) have thus become a significant tool to inspect schools development and improve their performance continuously. Since the 19th century, the educational evaluation in the US has gone through the phases of educational testing, objective assessment, school effectiveness movement and improvement movement, and now it is comprehensive with multiple sorts of evaluating programs. During this evolvement, experts on this subject have not only achieved enrich experience, but also harnessed it for the improvement of schools and quality of education. As for the situation in China, the ministry of education issued an official paper, National medium and long-term plan for education reform and development, which shed light upon schools evaluation reforms. Since that, regional governments have been working on this issue, and although we have witnessed some positive impacts, there is still a huge gap between China and the US on the design of evaluation programs and standards. Therefore, this study aims locating the problems of Chinese educational evaluation programs through analyzing and comparing their procedures and standards with those of the US, and thus making schools evaluation a real source of power to boost schools performance and the quality of education.To probe into the question mentioned above, I adopted historical analysis method, documentary method, case study and comparison method:to review the history of school evaluation in the US; to study the school evaluating programs, the related standards and their theoretical basis; to analyze the AdvancED school accreditation program and the Malcom Baldrige Award in the States as well as the "Star-grade schools" program in Jiangsu (China) as cases; and finally to compare and contrast the aforementioned programs, especially their evaluating standards and to answer the question-why school evaluating programs in the USA can have such a massive impact on their school performance. The study shows that it is because the Americans use scientific standards to evaluate their schools that their assessing programs are that valid:the more overall and detailed the standards are, the easier they can be applied, thus more effective the evaluating programs are. The form of the standards can be various:it can involve a general standard plus a highly detailed scoring guide or plus four levels under each standard, and of course it is advised that multiple sets of standards are used in one evaluating program to meet needs of schools of different performance.