A year has passed since Oseh Shalom was invited, along with seven other schools in the Washington DC area, to participate in a year-long pilot program sponsored by the Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning (our central agency for education) and funded by a grant from the Covenant Foundation.

The self-assessment centered around the following questions:

• Does our school have the infrastructure to achieve the goals we have established for ourselves?
• Does our school have a curriculum that reflects its goals?
• Is the school fulfilling its mandate to the community?
• Can a process of self-evaluation and strategic planning create an atmosphere for change and a mechanism leading to significant school improvement?

Our first task was to match our curricula to the school’s mission statement, to ensure they were clearly aligned. Next, our teachers were asked to gather portfolios of students’ work on several different units they taught. Teachers provided evidence of student learning and then reflected on whether the unit had been successfully taught, and if not, why not and what they would change.

Simultaneously, our Commendation Committee sifted through the demographic information and developed a school improvement plan for the next year. An outside validation team examined our data, looked at eight crates of materials, and reviewed our plan. They determined that Oseh Shalom had indeed met the criteria as a Commended School—we engaged in a serious process of self-assessment and developed a plan to improve.