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During the Spring of 2025, Northwest Christian School enjoyed several different internal and external assessments. The feedback yielded from these exercises fueled a robust period of reflection during the subsequent Summer 2025.
In the spirit of organizational transparency and integrity, and in a fashion that is aligned with our "Rowing Not Drifting" organizational ideals and aspirations, we are excited to share this data with you.
Below, please find links to the information that we are using to refine our focus on our school's mission and drive continuous improvement on the campus.
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Annually, Superintendent Geoff Brown publishes an online, anonymous parent survey. Over the years, the survey has come to be the largest single driver in shaping the priorities which frame the school's continuous improvement efforts. During the Spring of 2025, this survey enjoy just over 260 unique parental responses and was used extensively during Summer 2025 to help craft priorities for the 2025/2026 school year. To see a summary of the entire survey, please follow this link.
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Demographic information helps us to understand specifics about how our current community is shaped. At this link, you will discover a host of important information that shapes the Crusader family: gender of students, ethnicity, home churches, and our top home zip codes.
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During the month of April 2025, Northwest Christian enjoyed an accreditation visit from a team representing the Association of Christian Schools International and Cognia (formerly AdvancED). Via these two accrediting bodies, seven years ago, Northwest Christian achieved "Exemplary Accreditation". Beyond the standard accreditation, "exemplary" accreditation is a level of systemic and academic approval and affirmation enjoyed by just thirty other Christian schools in the world. To view the accreditation teams presentation to school faculty - a presentation which succinctly conveys their commendations and recommendations - please follow this link.
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Each spring, to every faculty and staff member employed by the school, Mr. Brown pushes out an anonymous, online administrative performance survey which enables each school employee to anonymously evaluate the individual to whom they support. As well, each and every employee is able to evaluate Mr. Brown's performance. In years past, this evaluation was done using the school's superintendent job description, the ACSI Head-of-School performance framework, or the 21 traits of an effective administrator from Dr. Toby Travis' book, "The TrustED School Leader". During the Spring of 2025 this latter tool was used as the evaluative framework so that it could be used as an evaluative framework referencing last year's results. This would enable Mr. Brown to reflect on whether or not he is growing in the estimation of the faculty and staff evaluating him. This is also the framework that the Northwest Christian School board uses in their annual evaluation of Mr. Brown. To review the results of Mr. Brown's performance in the view of the school's employees, please follow this link.
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Spiritual formation surveys have historically been a crucial metric employed by the school to provide insight into the effectiveness of the strategies that Northwest Christian uses to foster a Biblical worldview in students. Famously, Dr. Amy Yoder, Northwest Christian's Honors Senior English instructor and Grand Canyon University's first post-doctoral research fellow, used the Northwest Christian High School as the experimental group within her doctoral dissertation. (In November of 2023, the school's podcast featured six episodes with Amy in which she discussed the resulting data. To hear the first one, click here.) This Spring, the school used the same spiritual formation research questions used by Dr. Yoder to survey if its strategies and results within those strategies had improved since Yoder's initial research. To review the overall data from the Spring 2025 survey as it relates to Northwest Christian Middle School students, please follow this link. To review the data from Spring 2025 as it pertains to High School students, please click here. And, to see a summary of the Spring 2025 results compared against the results from Spring 2016 for High School students, please click here.
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Within any marketplace, organizations have the opportunity to distinguish themselves from their competition. Although it may be uncomfortable at first to consider, education, in this respect, is very much like any other industry. And, students and families are served best when schools are allowed to compete for students. If public schools have a monopoly on students, it can become a dangerous cultural environment. In that light, in order to succeed, a school, like any company in any industry, must seek to establish hold of its competitive niche - is it better than the competition? is it different from the competition? is it cheaper than the competition? Northwest Christian School is seeking to be better, cheaper, and different. To that end, in order to speak to the 'cheaper' niche, we annually collect tuitions for nearly every private school and online school in the Phoenix area. In tracking these tuitions, we seek to occupy the bottom third of the tuition price spectrum. You can see all of the tuitions for Arizona on-ground private schools - as well as our place on that list - at this link. To see tuitions for online schools, please follow this link.
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For the last eleven years, as the result of public voting, Northwest Christian School has been picked as the "Top Arizona Private School" within the pages of "Ranking Arizona" magazine.
How does NCS overtake private education behemoths like Grand Canyon University on a list like that?
Humility. Honesty. Self-reflection. A commitment to continuous improvement.
"Rowing, Not Drifting" is an annual report unlike any that you have ever read. It is the culmination of fifteen years of honest, self-effacing fact-finding and data-gathering. And, all of that self-reflection is represented with the pages of "Rowing Not Drifting" for you to consider as you ponder your prospective place your place in the mission of Northwest Christian School.
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Each year for the past decade-and-a-half, Northwest Christian School has gathered pertinent data that helps to gauge relative success in key areas of the school's mission: "The mission of Northwest Christian School is to provide a Bible-based program of education that enables students to develop a Biblical worldview."
To that end, the school compiles relevant key performance indicators within what we have termed "four pillars of mission fulfillment". These four pillars are: Biblical worldview, student performance, stewardship, and demonstrable excellence.
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