GILROY
– After four years of unifying the school district with specific
improvement goals, Superintendent Edwin Diaz is unveiling a new
accountability plan that will more closely monitor student progress
by allowing schools to set their own targets.
By Lori Stuenkel
GILROY – After four years of unifying the school district with specific improvement goals, Superintendent Edwin Diaz is unveiling a new accountability plan that will more closely monitor student progress by allowing schools to set their own targets.
The plan is essentially the next step to stay the district’s path of improvement established over the past four years, and shifts focus from streamlining goals district-wide to a more individualized focus, which Diaz says schools and classrooms need.
Using consultants from the Stupski Foundation and an accountability model designed by educator and assessment expert Douglas Reeves, Gilroy Unified School District and its board of trustees will spend the next year putting into place the Accountability Plan that calls for a task force of district and community members to oversee progress.
“For the last three years, we’ve really had a centrally directed improvement plan,” Diaz said. “We not only specified clearly the expectations, but also the strategies of how to reach those expectations.”
What’s clear at this point, he said, is that the district needs to more clearly define how teaching and learning will be measured, by using more than just student test scores.
“Now that sites have had some significant staff development, now I feel the tweaking in the approach is to give sites a little more leeway to identify specific strategies that they’re going to focus on in order to meet district-wide expectations,” Diaz said. “The reason this is so important is that each school, as they analyze data, are going to see either different grade levels or different classrooms that are making significant growth. And those that are not will now focus on what individual needs at their school site are as opposed to a district-wide approach.”
Those measures include both hard data, like test scores, and soft data, like staff and parent surveys.
Starting this fall, the district will measure its progress by tracking goals on three tiers:
– Tier one uses district-wide data required by the state and federal governments. These include standardized test scores, attendance rates, participation and success in Advanced Placement courses, parent satisfaction surveys and graduation and dropout rates.
– Tier two uses school-based data that reflect the decisions of the teachers, parents and administrators in each school or department. These include teaching practices, leadership, staffing and parent involvement.
– Tier three uses narratives from each school or department. The narrative analyzes why growth did or did not occur and connects Tier two to Tier one.
The idea with the school-based focus is that teachers will be meeting, probably monthly, to look at student progress using the indicators they choose. It will be a much tighter focus on individual students, classrooms and grade levels.
“You need to identify those assessments that you can use on an ongoing basis that are helpful to you,” Diaz said
After playing catch-up on the best practices in education since Diaz’s arrival, Trustee Jim Rogers said, Gilroy schools have come to the point where they are headed in the right direction, but
Four years ago, Rogers said, district schools were running on survival mode.
“Each school did what they thought best,” he said. “There was no district plan of any basic structure for academics – or anything like that – that had an end … .”
The three-year Strategic Plan takes care of that, he said, and the new Accountability Plan will quickly weed out programs or strategies that don’t work.
During an Accountability Plan study session Thursday evening, Trustee David McRae thought the plan sounded much like what is already happening at schools.
“Aren’t they already doing that?” he said. “Aren’t they already meeting by grade level to discuss teaching and performance?”
The difference, Diaz said, is that teachers will not be required to use certain standardized tests as often: GUSD likely will stop giving its Measure of Academic Progress test three times each year and instead give it once a year. A test given to students in primary grades may be given to fewer students next year.
Instead, teachers will set their own schedules for assessing students. The data will translate more quickly into lesson plans for the classroom, Diaz said.
David Fiorio, a Stupski consultant, responded to a question from Trustee Bob Kraemer of whether the tiered system will produce measurable results.
“The external measures do move,” Fiorio said, citing several examples of school districts, including Santa Fe, the foundation has worked with.
“It brings coherence,” Trustee Tom Bundros said of the plan. “We’ve got just … silos of stuff going on and this brings it together. We’re all on the same side, working in one direction.”
The key to implementing the plan – the Accountability Task Force – will be discussed in a study session Aug. 21.
The group will likely meet every two months this year to check the district’s progress, Diaz said.
It could consist of 25 parents, teachers, students, administrators and community members.
“We really want to make it representative of internal staff of the district and the community,” he said. “This task force, I believe, has a long-range function within the district.
The role that they would serve in the community and in the district would be with us from now on, where every year they would have a role in looking at the results in each of the key indicators, making recommendations to the board and communicating results to the community.”
