Use this page and the links it contains to walk through the Onboarding Strategic steps.

Benchmark Assessments

Your membership includes 11 benchmark assessments. These are designed to give your board a clear sense of your governance strengths and areas that need improvement. Taking the assessments also helps the Board and CEO get aligned about priority board development needs for the year. We highly recommend that your full board and CEO take all 11 assessments during your first 30 days of membership.

Who Should Take the Assessments?

BoardOnTrack recommends that all board members and the CEO take the assessments. Taking the assessments serves as a valuable learning tool. The collective assessment results are designed to help the board and CEO have an honest conversation about where the governance of the organization is and to help your board craft a plan to become more effective.

You can also use the assessments as part of your new trustee orientation program.

Reviewing and Interpreting Assessment Results

Viewing the Assessment

To view the data in your assessment, click on the "Assessments" option in the menu sidebar. Then select the Assessment that you wish to see an overview of. Next click on the box to view either the participants, the report, or the recommendations pages. 

• The assessment results are a tally of your board’s self-assessment.
• The rating is a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being “the high bar”.

The summary view shows:

• your score for each assessment and how you compare to the rest of the board
• the board's average score for each assessment
• the CEO's score for each assessment
• the completion rate for you, the board and the CEO of the assessments (Note: The goal is to have 100% completion rate)
• links to review each assessment report in detail 

View Assessment Detail Reports

Scroll past the Summary to view the detailed reports for each section of the assessment. You can also use the filter toggle at the top to customize your view. 

The detail view shows:

• your score for the assessment and how you compare to the rest of the board
• the board's average score for the assessment
• the CEO's score for the assessment
• how many board members completed the assessment
• detail scores for each area of the assessment
• We provide recommendations on what a typical charter school board should do to become more successful. If you do all of them, you will reach the high bar!
• In the detail sidebar links to resources to help the board develop in each particular area

Guidance on how to digest and use this information

• The assessments are designed to give the Board and the CEO an objective third-party take on your governance strengths and areas to improve
• Most boards find it useful to take these assessments once a year, typically in the late spring/early summer as a way to complete an annual full board assessment.
• In addition, if you have a lot of turnover at some other point in the year and/or add a handful of new trustees, you might want to retake the assessments to fully gauge the board’s knowledge.
• We recommend first thinking about participation. Did 100% of the trustees and the CEO complete 100% of the assessments? Why or why not? What does this tell you about how engaged the team is? What do you want to do about it?
• Successful boards have a strong partnership between the board and the CEO – skim these to identify how aligned the board and the CEO are on strengths and areas that need improvement. Are there places where the board (green) and CEO (teal) are not in sync? Flag these to discuss as a full group.
• Next skim again for the areas where the majority of respondents gave low marks (1s, 2s) prioritize these for discussion and action steps.
• Look for areas where you have mostly 4s and 5s an pat yourselves on the back.
• After processing out these results as a full board, use them to help you create a set of prioritized goals for the year. Remember, board goals are really committee-specific goals presented collectively.
• When you log in to BoardOnTrack and click on the assessments tab you’ll notice to the left of the assessment name there are icons. The first 5 and the last assessment have the icon that refers to the governance committee. The governance committee should look at these assessments and use them to help set their committee goals for the year. The corresponding committee should do the same for the other assessments.
• As you are working on goals and a work plan to take action on the areas where you need improvement, please note that if you click on the assessment report in BoardOnTrack below the results you will see content (samples, examples, etc.) that will help you take action.
• Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if we can help you with interpreting or prioritizing the information.

Updated July 22, 2024 19:42