I hope you'll read my new article, "Getting at the Roots of Bullying," published by the Virginia Journal of Education. It examines how to prevent bullying from occurring and how to intervene when necessary. Here's the link:
http://www.veanea.org/vea-journal/1010/index.html

Some important questions from a whole child perspective:
Are the students engaged in each of the schools each year?
Do the students make meaningful connections with adults and other students in each of the schools consistently year to year?
Answering these two questions may help to answer:
Does the scores on the assessment truly reflect what students know and can do?

Kathy,
I agree with the questions suggested by Judy.

I have a few questions about your school that can help to clarify what questions to ask:
How large is your school?
What are the demographics of your student body?
What kind of assessments are used in your state? Are they skills based or are they content-based end of course exams?
Has your school conducted any interim exams?

The answers to these questions can help to shed some light on your situation.

Possible questions to ask:
Have you made a histogram showing the following information for your school across these years?
1. Student enrollment #s by grade and overall school
2. Student demographics by grade and overall school
3. Student achievement by grade, content area, demographics and teacher if possible
4.Low skills or content areas – what specific academic areas and skills pulled down the school’s overall achievement scores each of these years?
5. Why do faculty think students scored low in these areas? (was a key teacher ill for an extended period of time…? It is important to correctly identify what prevented achievement before a school starts putting strategies in place to improve achievement…)
6. Reasons for demographic or enrollment changes (did a new apartment complex open in the attendance area? Were there attendance boundary changes?)
7.What kind of discipline data can you include for each of these years? # of suspensions? Drug / alcohol violations? Violence? Alternative placements?
8.Were there any unique conditions taking place in the school that year? (was the school closed due to asbestos for 3 months and the students transported to a different site?)
9.Are there other significant data points that should be embedded? (did anything change in regard to the middle schools feeding into the high school?)
10.Can you identify any trends or gain any insights as you look at the data across time? What does the data tell you?

Advice sought for school improvement:
What questions would you ask if your state test data showed the following trend in test scores with a steady rise in scores from first recorded year, a drastic two year drop, then a sharp increase again?
Year Percent passing
2010 79%
2009 69%
2008 71%
2007 87%
2006 84%
2005 79%
2004 67%
What questions should be asked, what further data would you look into to help explain the drop in schools over that two year period?