A
COMPREHENSIVE ACCOUNTABILITY MODEL
Functions
of the board of Trustees and Superintendent
- Set
the student performance standards, including and especially the requirement
for a school-leaving certificate set to internationally bench-marked standards
for 16-year old students. (One source is the New Standards program of the
National Center for Education and the Economy and the Learning Research and
Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh: see www.ncee.org. for
information).
- Decide
on the measures of student performance that will be used to assess progress
toward the standards.
- Decide
on other common measures of "results" including customer satisfaction
surveys.
- Decide
what results at the district school level will be rewarded and to whom the
rewards will go.
- Define
poor results at the school level and decide the consequences that will attend
those results.
- Decide
on the formula to allocate resources to the schools.
- Negotiate
contracts with all certified bargaining groups.
- Publish
a compendium of the laws and regulation by which the district's schools must
abide.
- Monitor
the compliance of the district schools with those laws and regulations, including
audits of financial, personnel, and performance reporting systems.
- Collect
and publish data on results at all levels of the system.
- Provide
information about effective programs, arrange for an aggressive program of
assistance to the lowest performing schools, and monitor outside providers
of education services to schools.
Functions
of the Individual Schools
- Decide
on a leadership team for the school to develop and implement the school goals
and plan.
- Decide
on a code of behavior to establish order and discipline.
- Add
their own standards and goals to those of the central office.
- Decide
on the measures thy will use to assess progress toward more goals and the
methods they will use to track progress.
- Decide
on the basis of research into best practices, on curricula and instruction
programs designed to get students to the target standards.
- Decide
on the best staffing structure to implement the instructional program.
- Decide
how to organize the school, how to assign students to classes that the master
schedule will be, and whether there will be after-school, Saturday and summer
school programs.
- Decide
on the best way to use non-personnel resources to get their students to the
standards.
- Decide
what skills and knowledge the staff will need to execute the plan and what
professional development program best provides those skills and that knowledge.
- Decide
how the school wants to involve parents, social service and public health
agencies, local employers, and others in the life of the school and build
a plan to make that involvement successful.
- Build,
based on all these decisions, an operational plan and operating budget that
will make best use of the available resources.
- Implement
the plan and revise it continuously based on analysis of the data on student
performance gathered by the school and the central office.
- Decide
based ont he school's own goals, whether the school should actively recruit
a body of students and parents interested in those goals and if so construct
a recruiting plan.
- Provide
all information required by the central office for its monitoring and auditing
functions.
