How to set targets for your educational goals
Setting targets for your goals is no easy task.
Many leaders create “ambitious” SMART goals. Another common approach is to set a “stretch” target where you shoot for some percentage increase over current performance.
No matter the method, most of the targets I’ve seen across my career have been pretty arbitrary.
In this post, I’m going to teach you a process for creating logical targets for your educational goals.
Accountability vs. Improvement Goals
The first step is to explicitly tell the team if the target is being created for an accountability purpose or if it is being created for an improvement purpose.
It’s important to not conflate the two.
Goals for accountability in a nutshell:
Purpose: To determine the application of rewards and sanctions.
Key question: Who is performing well and who isn’t?
What’s measured: End of the line outcomes
How often: Usually once per year (after the fact)
Goals for improvement in a nutshell:
Purpose: To learn our way to a system that produces higher levels of performance.
Key question: Are the changes I am making leading to improvement?
What’s measured: Outcomes and processes relevant to the object of change
How often: Frequently, as practice occurs
If your aim is to improve, then you need to take an improvement orientation.
Understand 3 Conditions of Healthy Goal-Setting
I reviewed the three conditions in September in my article entitled How to set educational goals. For a deeper dive you can check out that post, but I’ll do a quick review here.
To start, gather baseline data in the area you want to improve, and plot it in time order. It is helpful to have 15 or more points in your baseline, but we often must work with fewer data points in real life. The important thing is to show enough data in your baseline to illustrate the previous level of variation.
Then, you can work to understand the (1) capability, (2) variation, and (3) stability of the data system under study.
The three conditions taken together tell the story for how this data has performed historically.
In a quick glance, you can see the average performance over time (capability), how individual data points have moved up and down around that average (variation), and if there are any special data patterns (stability).
Naming Your Target
The next step is to explicitly name the type of target you are setting. I’ve come up with three distinct types of targets.
I call the first type a Fact of Life target. These are plain statements of fact with respect to budget realities and organizational survival.
Here’s an example: Unless student enrollment improves by 10% next year, the school will have to make staffing cuts. Another example would be the following: If we do not improve our reading proficiency rates by 20 percentage points, the state education department will put us on a corrective action plan.
The second type of target is the Within Reach target. These are targets that are possible without redesigning or significantly changing the structure of the current system. This isn’t to say that hitting the target will be easy, only that it doesn’t necessarily require substantial system redesign efforts.
For example, let’s say you’ve set a target that 75% of the students at your school will score proficient or higher on the 3rd grade ELA state test. Your school’s hypothetical rates for the last nine years are illustrated in the process behavior chart below.
Figure 1. 3rd Grade ELA State Proficiency Rates
The average proficiency rate is 60.7% across the nine years (green line), and the upper limit is 76.5% based on the data (red line). This means that the 75% target is within reach, although not without focused improvement efforts.
The last type of target is the Moonshot. A Moonshot is an ambitious target that is outside of the capability of your current system. If you determine that a Moonshot is appropriate for your improvement efforts, it needs to be made abundantly clear that working towards this type of target will likely include making significant changes to the design of your system and will occur over the long-term.
I’ll illustrate an example of a Moonshoot target in the next section.
Target Setting Example
Let’s turn to an example to tie all of the target-setting components together. For this example, I am going to focus on chronic absenteeism, which is something many schools are grappling with post-pandemic.
At United Schools, 20-25% of students were chronically absent in any given year prior to the pandemic. After the initial school closures in Spring 2020, those rates skyrocketed above 50%.
When you look at this chronic absenteeism plotted over time, you can clearly see the difference pre- and post-pandemic. Taken together, the average chronic absenteeism rate from 2016-17 to 2024-25 was 42.8% (the green line in the chart below).
Figure 2. Student Chronic Absenteeism Rates
Now that you have a basic understanding of the situation, let’s step through how we’ve set a target for improving chronic absenteeism.
Accountability vs. Improvement Goals: We’ve formed a team from across our school system to work on the chronic absenteeism problem. They are working on running experiments we call Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles to improve student attendance. These experiments typically last 3-4 weeks with the purpose of learning our way to a system that reduces absenteeism. The key point is that this work is built around an improvement orientation and not an accountability orientation.
3 Conditions of Healthy Goal-Setting: Over the last four years, 54% of our students have been chronically absent with very little variation during this time. This means that we can expect our rates of chronic absenteeism to continue to perform in this way unless we intervene.
Naming Your Target: We’ve set a target to decrease our chronic absenteeism rates down to 5%. This particular target is a hybrid between a Fact of Life and a Moonshot. It’s a Fact of Life target because it’s a plain statement of fact that children need to be in school consistently to learn. It’s a Moonshot because the 5% target is outside of the current capabilities of our school system as designed.
Our team is working on a number of fronts to improve chronic absenteeism rates. There’s the aforementioned improvement team focused on this problem. We also have made a big bet on the importance of transportation and brought this in-house for the first time in our 18 year history. This represents a major system redesign.
We’ll continue to monitor these rates over the next several years as we work toward the 5% target and make adjustments as we learn what is working and what is not.
Summary
If you’re a school leader and you’ve struggled to set logical targets for your educational goals, three big ideas from this article can help put you on the right track.
Big Idea 1: Differentiate between accountability and improvement goals.
Big Idea 2: Understand the three conditions prior to setting a target.
Big Idea 3: Name your target to convey the level of challenge involved.
After applying these big ideas to your target-setting work, your team will have a clear understanding of the logic that underlies each target. Then, you can get to work as a team on important improvement initiatives.
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John A. Dues is the Chief Learning Officer for United Schools, a nonprofit charter management organization that supports four public charter school campuses in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of the award-winning book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. Send feedback to jdues@unitedschools.org.