The Bromfield School “report card” issued by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges commission (NEASC) this past January (see related article, “The two-year path to renewal of Bromfield’s accreditation”), gives the school high marks in some areas, but low marks in others. While the school once again won accreditation, the report makes 44 recommendations for improvement and asks the school to demonstrate considerable progress in one particular area by August.
This week and next, the Press will explore the details of the NEASC report, its significance, and how Bromfield’s teachers and administrators plan to respond.
Many of the recommendations NEASC makes are for Bromfield to “show your work.” While the school may get an “A” for turning out high-achieving and civic-minded young people, for example, the report says Bromfield needs to show how it got those students to that level and prove that every student had the same opportunity to achieve it.
In this day and age, interim Superintendent Joe Connelly told the Press, there is a demand for data-driven evidence. “We are ready to roll up our sleeves” and produce it.
In a recent interview, Bromfield Principal Jim O’Shea said he had assembled a follow-up committee to respond to the NEASC report, and that members have already made a great deal of progress in mapping out a plan to meet the recommendations. Because of the amount of time it will take to do the work required by NEASC for August, this year’s nearly $12 million budget has had to shift some professional development dollars to fund committee work during the summer.
Along with that, says O’Shea, the original seven committees of the school-wide self-study will be reassembled to work on recommendations within their areas of expertise. O’Shea says that as each group reviews the NEASC recommendations, the touchstone will be, “How does this help our kids?”
NEASC uses seven standards to evaluate high schools throughout New England. Four of these fall under the title “Teaching and Learning” and three under “Support of Teaching and Learning Standards.” The first of the Teaching and Learning standards deals with core values, beliefs, and 21st century learning expectations.
The standard states: “Effective schools identify core values and beliefs about learning that function as explicit foundational commitments to students and community. Decision-making remains focused on and aligned with these critical commitments. Core values and beliefs manifest themselves in research-based, schoolwide 21st-century learning expectations. Every component of the school is driven by the core values and beliefs and supports all students’ achievement of the school’s learning expectations.” In other words, the beliefs and expectations are like the blueprint for the entire school structure.
Creating the document
It is in this all-important standard that the NEASC report delivers its severest criticism of Bromfield. In fact, by August the school must show a clear plan and have developed products to meet the recommendations in this area. While only three of the 44 recommendations fall under this standard, it is the standard most crucial to address, as it drives curriculum, instruction, and assessment, and, in fact, should inform all decision-making in the school.
The first step in meeting this standard is for the school community to engage in a “dynamic, collaborative and inclusive process” to create its core values and beliefs about learning. Although Bromfield “passed” this requirement, it did so with some conflict and confusion.
The NEASC report finds that “many members of the school community cannot cite specifics of the document, discuss with any detail its origin, or describe the process in which input was collected.” In what seems like a contradictory corollary, the next sentence states: “There is consensus among all, however, that the document most assuredly represents what educators, students, parents, and the community members feel about the high academic expectations demanded of a Bromfield School education.” The report goes on to say that the School Committee approved the document in spring of 2011 but affirmed that the process for gathering input was limited and greater feedback opportunities would be expected in the future. The NEASC report makes no mention of the Five-year Strategic Plan approved in 2008, which set forth beliefs and expectations for learning.
Bromfield principal Jim O’Shea clarified this confusion by saying that when NEASC visited Bromfield two years ago to discuss the self-study process, it became clear that the standards by which NEASC would be evaluating Bromfield did not match the standards under which the school had been operating. The values, beliefs and expectations needed to be formatted in such a way as to match the NEASC document. The existing values and expectations stated in the Harvard Education Plan, the Five-Year Strategic Plan, and the 11 Critical Thinking Skills that Bromfield faculty had developed collaboratively and adopted in 2009 had to be synthesized into one document formatted to the NEASC standards. A relatively small group of people did this work, and it is this process which some faculty members cite as being non-inclusive and to which the School Committee has taken steps to assure is more inclusive in the future. O’Shea says that the follow-up committee is addressing the evolution of the current document of values and expectations and discussing how to ensure that the entire faculty can fully buy into it.
The need for analytic rubrics
So although NEASC had issues with the way in which it was developed, a document of values, beliefs, and learning expectations for The Bromfield School is nevertheless firmly in place.
The problem, says NEASC, is that there are no analytic rubrics that clearly define and measure these expectations and identify targeted high levels of achievement. The report states that while the school has established a culture to challenge all students to meet its 21st-century learning expectations and achieve high levels of academic, social and civic competencies, “the lack of identified, targeted levels of student achievement to be assessed, using specific, analytic school-wide rubrics to measure student progress prevents the collection of school-wide data to effectively gauge deeper analysis of student progress toward meeting the school’s stated goals.” This suggests that it is not enough to argue that these expectations are embedded in the school culture; they must be “proved.”
Principal O’Shea acknowledged the amount of time and energy it will take to meet this recommendation, but he implied that it is better to have conversations around specifics than proceed on the basis of unsupported assumptions.
The first task of the school, then, is to develop school-wide analytic rubrics by which to measure student progress and ensure that each student is achieving up to his or her ability. Principal O’Shea described what this will entail. For each of the 11 critical thinking skills that the school has identified, a set of assignments will be created, each at a different grade level. A rubric will be written which analyzes the skill itself and describes four levels of achievement into which a student may fall. For example, to meet the expectation of “advanced” in the critical thinking skill of comparison and contrast, analytic rubrics could be developed for an English essay in grade eight, a science experiment in grade 10 and a wellness activity in grade 12. The results would show not only individual progress in the thinking skill but also the progress of the school in meeting this standard. A similar process will be applied to the social and civic competencies.
Beliefs and expectations drive all else
The school must also develop and implement a process to ensure that the values, beliefs, and expectations drive its curriculum, instruction, and assessment in every classroom, and guide the school’s policies, procedures, decisions, and resource allocations. According to the self-study, changes in curriculum have been made in response to the values, beliefs, and expectations, but NEASC points out that “the manner in which these core values were used to drive curriculum change is not documented and is not clear.” In some classes changes in instruction have been made to better meet the needs of all learners and there have been attempts to increase the use of formative assessment. Again, though, the report contends that “only when the document becomes a clear source of principles for all curriculum, instruction, and assessment and clearly drives all decision-making will it ensure that all students are able to learn to the level of the school’s expectations.” The third recommendation is that the school must develop and implement a formal, ongoing plan, with a timeline to review, that re-examines the values, beliefs and expectations.
Although Principal O’Shea acknowledges that meeting the recommendations of the NEASC report will take a lot of time and energy, he says it feels good to be involved in a project that is really focused on teaching and learning. In the end, it will be of benefit to the entire school community.
Read the full NEASC report.
Next week: Other standards, more recommendations.
