Home from Massachusetts School Accreditation Trip

Hey, y'all,

Last Tuesday night I returned home from 3 days spent in Maynard, Massachusetts. I was honored and pleased to have been invited to serve on an External Review Team for AdvancED, the accreditation body who this past Fall had reviewed my own online school and awarded us a 5 year accreditation based on final review numbers the lead evaluator called "statistical anomoly" due to their across-the-board superlative high ranges when compared to like schools internationally.

AdvancED is dedicated to helping schools improve, and on a vast scale. From their website's About page:

AdvancED is the largest community of education professionals in the world. We are a non-profit, non-partisan organization that conducts rigorous, on-site external reviews of PreK-12 schools and school systems to ensure that all learners realize their full potential. While our expertise is grounded in more than a hundred years of work in school accreditation, AdvancED is far from a typical accrediting agency. Our goal isn’t to certify that schools are good enough. Rather, our commitment is to help schools improve.

Combining the knowledge and expertise of a research institute, the skills of a management consulting firm and the passion of a grassroots movement for educational change, we serve as a trusted partner to 32,000 schools and school systems—employing more than four million educators and enrolling more than 20 million students—across the United States and 70 other nations. AdvancED was created through a 2006 merger of the PreK-12 divisions of the North Central Association (NCA) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS)—and expanded through the addition of the Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC) in 2011.

 It was truly a learning experience for me, and I feel privileged to have worked so closely with the team chosen to review and recommend accreditation for The Virtual High School in Maynard, an organization providing learning opportunities to students worldwide utilizing a unique model to do so for nearly 20,000 students in 47 states and 34 countries. Thanks to Wendy Amato; Marcel Monnar; and Donna Richardson, team Lead Evaluator, for their collegial collaboration and to everyone at VHS for their gracious hospitality and openness through the process!

Here's hoping for some relief up there from the incredible winter they have experienced. It was 15 degrees Fahrenheit our last morning, and though streets are clear there's still plenty of snow on the ground, up to 4 or 5 feet in places.

Busy busy busy!

Okay, I believe this weather has come up in order to give me a bit of a break to get my house(s) in order.

Ice on the foliage suggests road conditions

If you read my previous post about NYSCATE Digital Wave and more, it was already pretty clear I'm fairly stretched this season. Yesterday MNPS closed its Main Office, telling not only 10 and 11 month employees (who are off with pay on school closure days) but 12 monthers, of whom I am one, to stay home and off the treacherous, icy roads--an almost unprecedented move. Today, they are calling office and 12 month staff workers in late, at 10, with the option to remain home by using a vacation or personal day. I'm going to exercise that option and cash in one of my stockpiled vacation days. Cool. [Even cooler--while I'm writing this they tell us all to stay home again, saving me a vacation day! To quote the email announcement: 

 

12 month employees:

 

We are shutting down the entire system again today (Tuesday, February 17, 2015.  Road conditions are as bad or worse than I’ve seen since 1993.

Please stay home and stay safe.]

One of the things I am working on is the online training for yet another upcoming travel experience, the trip to Maynard, Massachusetts on March 21 to serve on a 3 day external review team for AdvanceEd, the accrediting body for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), and for other international organizations, including our own Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

I was invited to do so a couple of months ago, on the basis of our own stellar results in the online school accreditation review, where our numbers were so high in relation to the average results of the ~32,000 schools regularly reviewed that we were called "a statistical anomoly" in the Executive Review presentation. See the review document, and read this "Children First" announcement from Feb. 2, which I will cherish always.

I'm working on two keynote addresses today as well. One for my March 13 NYSCATE appearance, and one for my part in our Leadership Team keynote for v-TEACH15, a week from Friday and the next day at Martin Center here in Nashville. There's still time to register and make plans to attend, and Music City should be de-iced by then! My pups sure hope so:

Graphic representation of the concept "Forlorn"

And I will be playing some ukelele today. And maybe some WoW. And looking at mounting Sim-on-a-stick for our MNPS Virtual World I. And napping. Thank you, oh Weather, for the day to pursue a broad range of interests at will. Y'all: Stay safe and warm.

Accreditation! Check!

Yesterday MNPS Virtual School rounded out two days of intensive review by a four person visiting committee from AdvanceED, the accreditation organization which handles Continuous Improvement model review for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

The extensive review process was described afterward by one of our Academy of Business and Marketing partners, who had undergone it herself, as "maybe more intense than writing my [Masters] dissertation." It involves weeks of collaborative work within the organization, compiling documentary evidence that the school meets or exceeds a set of criteria set by the reviewing organization, which serves over 32,000 schools in 173 countries. The process needs be driven by a single person in the school but everyone in the team is tapped to help provide evidential  documentation. Dr. Witty was the driver, and our "small but mighty" Executive Leadership team, aided by most of our Adjunct v-Teachers, contributed.

In order to even begin compiling said evidence, long meetings with a detailed self-evaluation tool were held in order to identify which kinds of documentation may be needed for each individual element in an extensive rubric. 

During the visit, the four team members from AdvanceED scheduled and held separate interview sessions with stakeholders, including students, parents, staff, faculty, and administration. They sequestered themselves in a conference room for hours, also spending time meeting off-campus in their hotel, discussing and debating findings toward preparing an exit review report rooted in consensus.

At around 2:30 yesterday, Dr. Karla Gable, the leader of the review team, reported out. She presented our brief "External Review Exit Report for Digital Learning Institutions." Toward the end, Dr. Gable shared what AdvancED calls their "Index of Education Quality, "a set of numbers that represent the review findings in quantitative ways so that they can be compared with those achieved by all of those many schools in their system. Our scores in each of the free domains, "Teaching and Learning Impact," "Leadership Capacity," and "Resource Utilization," were very significantly higher than the averages. I won't detail those but I will share that our overall score was 337.80 and the AE Network average overall score is 282.79. The final slide in her PowerPoint set proclaimed the news:

Dr. Karla Gable prepares to present final findings

We had done it. The information we had collected and shared in a massive Dropbox folder, then summarized in a 43 slide PowerPoint of our own on Monday, had clearly demonstrated that we deserve to be among the digital learning institutions accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The committee team's report further noted a few things, including that the strides toward excellence we have made over our brief life as a program and a school--these at other districts have only been made with both funding levels and staffing levels at 3 or 4 times the ones we have had in place. Either we are very efficient or we are very lucky. I'm guessing it's a combination of the two. And we are blessed to be led by Dr. James Witty, our Executive Principle, who is organized to a tee and completely knowledgeable about how Continuous Improvement philosophies and concepts drive a school to excellence.

Our team is very special, and by that I mean not only our core Leadership team--I extend that description to everyone in the school, all the stakeholders, all of us. Importantly, now that we have distinguished our school in this way we can return our full attention to exercising the continuous improvement we have demonstrated thus far. Thank you, AdvanceED, SACS, and Metro Nashville Public Schools. We're on it.

Over and out,

Scott

Cross-posted from MNPS Virtual School