School Quality

NEA is committed to doing all it can to make public schools great for every child. Continuously improving the quality of our schools and the education that America's children receive has always been a top priority of teachers and school staff.

A commitment to making all public schools great requires:

• Reducing class size, particularly for younger students
• Taking steps to ensure there's a high quality teacher in every classroom
• Having high expectations for all students.

Efforts at improving school quality must involve teachers and school staff in the process, must be adequately funded, and must use proven reform methods—methods that are research-based and field-tested.

NEA's KEYS Initiative

What makes a quality school? In 1989, NEA researchers set out to answer that question by identifying the conditions a school needed to have in place for students to achieve at the highest levels. After surveying educators nationally, the researchers found that high quality schools all displayed the same set of characteristics, or quality indicators, centered around six KEYS:

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 
5. Resources to support teaching and learning 
6. Curriculum and instruction

The result of this ground-breaking research is the KEYS Initiative. Short for Keys to Excellence for Your Schools, KEYS is a tool that can help with school improvement plans and meeting the challenges of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). KEYS is:

• a survey tool that lets schools measure for themselves the extent to which the quality indicators are present
• a process that brings educators, parents and the community together to improve their local schools.

The KEYS program is a proven yardstick for checking a school's organizational profile and climate in areas like staff interaction, decision making, and parent-community support. With those data in hand, school staff, parents, and administrators can then focus on what issues they want to address together, and what they want to change. 

Across the nation, hundreds of schools have used NEA's KEYS program to put themselves on the road to quality and ultimately to improved student achievement.

Read more about how KEYS was developed, and then visit the KEYS Online Web site to learn more about the KEYS Initiative.  The KEYS surveys are available in paper and Web-based formats and in Spanish.