It's a first! GHAEA's Differentiated Accountability site vist

David VanHorn, associate administrator

Have you heard? Green Hills AEA is going through an accountability visit  this school year. The visit is happening this week -- May 10-13. This is no ordinary accountability visit. This is a differentiated accountability visit and 2015-16 is the first year for this kind of visit.

As stated by the Iowa DE, “beginning with implementation of a pilot in 2015-2016 and full implementation in 2016-2017, the DE is leading the state to a new system of differentiated accountability and support. Iowa’s new system is founded on seven basic concepts:

1. Tiered support

2. Healthy Indicators

3. Earned autonomy

4. Collaborative Inquiry Questions

5. A single continuous improvement process

6. Streamlined reporting

7. Emphasis on results for Iowa learners.”

 
Green Hills AEA is the only AEA involved in this type of accountability this year. It was decided to volunteer for this type of visit because it was the pilot year for the visit, meaning we could have input on the development of the process. It has been five years since we last went through an accountability visit.
Preparations for the visit have been minor. In the past we would pull in teams of people to put together a body of evidence that we meet our accreditation standards. For the current visit we uploaded two artifacts for the different standards into a web site developed by the Iowa DE. They were very clear they only wanted two artifacts for each standard. Review of those artifacts is being done as part of a desk audit and will not play a very big role in the visit itself. During the visit, a team of administrators and GHAEA certified personnel will meet with a statewide team to review data around four areas. Those areas include:

1. Percent of PK-3 students screened with a valid and reliable measure;
2. Percent of PK-3 students meeting benchmark with a valid and reliable measure;
3. Percent of PK-3 students who were not at benchmark and who were monitored with a valid and reliable assessment;
4. Percent of students staying at/above benchmark across three screening windows.

Because this is a pilot year there will be a lot of outside visitors coming to the agency. The purpose for the number of people attending is to develop the process, through conversation with the GHAEA team, so it may be fully implemented in the 2016-17 school year. The process has been developed and refined through visits with local districts this year. Now, it is time for the AEA.

This week we will review our data around the the areas listed above. GHAEA data will be comprised all of our local district’s data, aggregated to the AEA level. Next, we will answer a series of questions related to the data, including topics such as how do we support schools in each of the areas and what do we do to respond to needs identified by the data. By the end of the visit we will have an action plan developed, which will inform the work we need to do in the coming year and years.

I have no doubt all will go well during the visit. We have outstanding staff here at GHAEA. Our staff members are already doing fantastic work related to the areas being examined, and areas not currently being evaluated, during our visit. Kudos to all of you for your good work and for the confidence we are able to have because of your work.