After a two-year effort by Harvard teachers and administrators, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) renewed the Bromfield School’s accreditation this January. But the NEASC commission also found many areas in which the school could improve. Its report cited fundamental problems in curriculum, instruction, and assessment that Bromfield must address within a designated time.
NEASC is one of six regional accrediting agencies in the nation. Accreditation provides a standard by which high schools can decide to accept transfer credits from one another and colleges can judge the quality of an applicant’s academic record. Accreditation also assures taxpayers “that tax money is supporting a school facility and programs that have been judged worthwhile by an outside team of evaluators,” according to the NEASC website. Accreditation must be renewed every 10 years.
‘A major undertaking’
Bromfield Principal Jim O’Shea, who also went through the accreditation process at another school district earlier in his career, said, “It is always a major undertaking.” O’Shea explained that Bromfield began preparing for the NEASC commission almost two years ago.
Accreditation is a three-step process. As the first step, the school’s faculty and administration do a self-study. At Bromfield, a steering committee chaired by math teacher Kelly Carlucci and English teacher Chris Jones oversaw the self-study. All teachers and administrators took part in the 11-month project. They gathered data, wrote reports, took surveys, held discussion groups, and attended regional seminars. Interim School Superintendent Joe Connelly pointed out that the faculty tackles all this work in addition to a full day of classroom teaching.
In the second step, a school hosts a visiting team of NEASC members, made up of teachers and administrators from other districts. Bromfield’s visiting committee included 16 volunteers who came to Harvard for four days last spring. From April 29 to May 2, they met with teachers, administrators, parents, and students. Each member of the visiting committee shadowed a student for half a day. In addition, they spent 14 hours in classes and met individually with 32 teachers. The committee reported to NEASC’s Commission on Public Secondary Schools, which made the final decision on accreditation.
This official visit is costly as well as time-consuming. Connelly, who has been through the accreditation process in two other school districts, estimated that schools usually budget $20,000 to $25,000 for the accreditation process. A large part of that sum is spent on accommodations and meals for visiting committee.
Several months went by before Bromfield received the NEASC committee’s written report, which arrived in fall of 2012. Bromfield’s administrators then had an opportunity to respond to any findings that they considered inaccurate in the preliminary report. NEASC’s final report on Bromfield included 24 commendations (citing the school’s strong points) and 44 recommendations (areas in which improvement was called for).
Finally, in the third step, Bromfield will follow up on findings from both the self-study and the NEASC report. The most basic of the report’s recommendations is that Bromfield make sure that the school’s core values and beliefs, as set forth in its own statement, guide all decisions about curriculum, instruction, policies, procedures, and allocation of resources. (See sidebar, right, and related article, “Grading Bromfield: NEASC delivers a mixed report card.”)
Many of the report’s recommendations focused on the need to create specific rubrics, or standards for performance, by which teachers can measure whether or not students are mastering the critical thinking skills in Bromfield’s own list. The report urges Bromfield to put in place a system for assessing student progress at many points throughout a class (formative assessment) as well as through major tests, term papers, or final exams (summative assessment).
A top 100 school
Although the number of problem areas cited in the report might seem unexpected for a high-achieving school like Bromfield (which was named one of the top 100 public high schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in 2010), both Connelly and O’Shea maintained a very positive outlook on the process.
“We’ve accepted and embraced this,” Connelly said. “We take it very seriously.”
O’Shea agreed, saying that the self-study is particularly valuable. “It promotes discussion within the building,” he said, adding, “We’ve made a lot of changes based on these discussions even before the final report arrived.”
Read the full NEASC report.
