Tracing the Evolution of KEYS

In 1990, NEA researchers set out to define and quantify the critical organizational conditions of school quality, and the NEA KEYS initiative was born.  This section traces the development of KEYS from the original research to the most recent efforts to broaden the scope and improve the KEYS instrument.

The Original KEYS Research

For the original study, NEA developed a 256-item questionnaire that was based on the "effective schools" research and Edward Deming's quality and continuous improvement principles. The instrument asked teachers to rate their own schools in three areas: (1) the extent to which the conditions enumerated in the questionnaire were present, (2) the quality of education, and (3) the level of student achievement.

NEA researchers, analyzing responses from more than 1600 teachers, identified 35 indicators of school quality that fell into five KEY areas:  

1. shared understanding and commitment to high goals,
2. open communication and collaborative problem solving,
3. continuous assessment for teaching and learning,
4. personal and professional learning, and
5. resources to support teaching and learning. 

The research findings were further validated through a series of case studies in six school districts across the country.

The Original KEYS Instrument

This survey instrument was further refined (and shortened), and school staff in more than 1,000 schools across the country have used the results to spark discussion and direct efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning in their schools. The survey also allowed them to compare their data with benchmarks relating to the 35 organizational conditions shown empirically to support effective teaching and learning and high student achievement.

The Development of the NEA KEYS 2.0 Survey

NEA recently began a process of revising and improving the survey in order to make the instrument more user friendly, to improve both data reporting and interpretation, and, most importantly, to ensure that all survey items addressed teaching and learning concepts and conditions that directly affect the core purpose of schools -- improving student achievement.

NEA revised the KEYS instrument in stages. In the first phase, existing items were revised and new items specifically related to teaching and learning concepts were developed. Phase two involved pilot testing the revised instrument in schools across the country and developing preliminary national norms and best practices benchmarks.

As a result of the revision, the instrument retained the best of the original KEYS including the five original KEYS (noted above) while also expanding its scope. While the original instrument was limited to an assessment of a school's organizational conditions that support teaching and learning, KEYS 2.0 includes a large set of questions that focus most directly on issues of teaching and learning such as the quality of content standards, curriculum, assessments, and instruction.

In the KEYS 2.0 pilot test, the questionnaire was administered to all education employees (teachers, education support professionals, and administrators) in some 38 schools (28 affiliated with NEA and 10 with AFT). The sample included elementary, middle, and high schools in urban, suburban, and rural settings.

In addition to the questionnaire data from the staff in each school, several measures of student achievement data were collected. The measures included all available school test data as well as respondents' perceptions of how well students were achieving. 

Analysis of the KEYS 2.0 Data

Some 42 indicators of quality that were grouped into six main KEYS were identified. The first five keys are the same as the ones identified in the original KEYS. The sixth key, curriculum and instruction, is new.

Based on the NEA research, as well as reports in the education research literature, all 42 quality indicators are considered important elements of a high-performing school. In addition to identifying the six major keys and the 42 indicators of a high performing school, the NEA KEYS 2.0 research allows each school the opportunity to compare its scores on each indicator with the average scores of all the schools in the pilot as well as with the school scoring in the 90th percentile of the distribution of all the schools in the sample.