When a school is identified for improvement under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the conversation often jumps straight to solutions, such as adopting a new curriculum, investing in a new coaching model, hiring new leadership, or revising instructional schedules. But before education leaders prescribe specific fixes, they must understand what’s really driving the current outcomes and determine whether all students have access to the conditions that make learning possible.

ESSA is clear in this regard. The law requires districts and schools to develop improvement plans that are “based on a school-level needs assessment,” include evidence-based interventions, and identify resource inequities. The “why” is simple: without a strong diagnosis, improvement efforts are more likely to be disconnected from students’ true experience — especially for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds.

Diagnostic Work is an Equity Move, Not a Paperwork Exercise

Underperformance is rarely the result of one thing. Schools serving communities that have experienced a long history of improvement challenges are often navigating a complicated mix of academic needs, staffing challenges, and barriers outside school walls. It’s easy for systems to blame context or to chase the next new shiny program of the year.

But exploring root causes of a school’s performance is a key component of sustainable improvement — just like a disease cannot be cured without a diagnosis, a school cannot improve without a root cause analysis.

What Strong Diagnostic Reviews and Needs Assessments Look Like

Strong reviews and needs assessments don’t ignore external factors such as poverty, student mobility, language barriers, or trauma. Instead, they simply refuse to let those realities become the end of the story, and help to identify what’s changeable and what must be resourced and addressed differently.

For example, Mandaree School District (MSD), located in rural North Dakota, serves students primarily from tribal communities, and over 90% of students are from low-income backgrounds. After being identified for Comprehensive Support, the district partnered with Cognia for data collection and improvement efforts while still honoring the community’s tribal values. As MSD leaders understood, this was not just about test scores. Needs assessments area disciplined effort to answer:

• What are students experiencing academically and socially, and who is being underserved?
• Which adult practices and system conditions are driving current outcomes, both successful ones as well as those where growth is needed?
• What are the two to three priorities that will create the largest improvements if done well?
• What resources, time, and capabilities are required to implement and sustain measurable change?

MSD leaders gathered feedback from students, teachers, families, and community leaders alongside key metrics such as attendance, discipline, academic performance, and readiness indicators — allowing them to triangulate across multiple data sources.

The district also named existing strengths. When leaders can articulate what’s working, they are better positioned to build momentum rather than focus solely on what needs to change. For MSD, this meant leveraging the community’s deep commitment to cultural resilience. The district launched a Culture Elder Committee and Pow-Wow collaboration to celebrate Native American heritage where students had access to a Cultural Drum Club and Ribbon Skirt Making Club — the results have been astounding. In just one year, students in grades K-2 exceeded the five-year proficiency goal in reading, jumping from 7% to 21% proficiency.

Community Engagement is a Strategy, Not a Checkbox

ESSA’s intent is also explicit about partnership. Improvement plans shouldn’t be written to communities; they should be built with them.

Community engagement is especially important when many barriers are outside the classroom — chronic absenteeism is a prime example. Two Memphis schools, participating in a school turnaround pilot, achieved remarkable progress in under four years by tackling this challenge head-on. Between 2020-2021 and 2022-2023, the two schools cut chronic absenteeism by 78% and 21% respectively. Their approach brought together “unlikely partners including utility companies, grocery stores, churches, rideshare services, and youth programs” with school leaders to get students back in the classroom. This effort transformed simple engagement into collaborative problem-solving, addressed root causes identified through the needs assessment, and developed a shared diagnosis paired with supports. Academic progress followed in tow: the two schools were in the 98th and 92nd percentile, respectively, for ELA growth in their state in 2022-23.

Here are five questions advocates can ask as part of these processes:

1. What evidence informed the needs assessment, beyond summative test scores, and what root causes were identified?
2. Whose voices helped shape the diagnosis (students, families, educators, community partners), and how were they involved?
3. Which resource inequities were identified and what is the concrete plan to address them?
4. Are the selected interventions evidence-based, and what will be monitored publicly to show progress?
5. What will change in adult practice and system supports in the next 30, 60, and 90 days, not just over the next year?

Where Do Education Advocates Need to Push Next?

Even when ESSA is implemented with good intentions, many improvement systems still behave like compliance engines consisting primarily of reports, developing plans, and monitoring requirements. These processes are put on repeat without changing underlying conditions to better meet student needs.

At a system-level, equity-driven improvement also requires accountability systems that:

• Measure opportunity, not only outcomes
• Make rigorous, root-cause-driven needs assessments non-negotiable
• Build faster feedback loops than traditional annual assessments
• Shift from surveillance to reciprocal accountability with shared responsibility across schools, districts, and states

This is where thought leadership matters: organizations like Cognia have shown that serious improvement demands robust diagnosis, multi-source evidence, and continuous improvement mindsets while being honest that progress is complex, contextual, and rarely linear.

When done well, needs assessments and authentic community partnership don’t just satisfy ESSA, they amplify its foundational purpose. These coordinated efforts help build a roadmap away from compliance rituals towards equitable improvement by telling the truth about current conditions and building the will and capacity to change them.

This is the third post in EdTrust’s School Improvement blog series. This blog series features authors from EdTrust and partner organizations who explore different dimensions of school improvement and how it intersects with other core education advocacy issues. This series follows the release of a new EdTrust report, “Examining State Education Agency Perspectives on School Improvement Supports,” which draws on interviews and focus groups with state education agency (SEA) leaders across 11 states and Washington, D.C. to explore the barriers and opportunities SEAs face when designing, monitoring, and evaluating school improvement efforts.

Donna Johnson Geist is the vice president of strategic partnerships at Cognia.

Photo by Allison Shelley for EDUimages

Series: School Improvement