|  | Saint Paul Public Schools releases task force report with recommendations for new school accountability framework
5/31/2002 9:55 AMThe Saint Paul Public Schools today released a report and recommendations from the Superintendent’s Accountability Framework Task Force to Superintendent Patricia Harvey about a new accountability system for categorizing schools against a set of performance standards.
The task force, which began its work in December of 2001, included a diverse cross section of 35 administrators, principals, teachers, parents, business people and representatives from the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers. The group reached agreement on the complicated issue of judging school performance and improvement. In the report, the task force recommends that the Saint Paul Public Schools develop an accountability framework that incorporates the new requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law as well as a new set of measures that are important to the Saint Paul community.
“I want to thank the dedicated men and women who served on this extraordinary task force,” said Superintendent Harvey. “I not only accept their report, I endorse its broad conclusions and believe that the task force’s recommendations are a good road map for our future accountability efforts in Saint Paul.”
In 1999, the Saint Paul Public Schools developed and implemented an accountability framework that uses the results of the Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT7) to evaluate school performance for placement into one of three school performance categories. The task force recommends that a new school district accountability framework use multiple measures to place schools into one of four performance categories rather than rely on one test. Those multiple measures include student gains on the district-selected standardized test, results of school-wide surveys at each school, improvement in meeting state standards, attendance rates, and graduation rates.
A full copy of the Superintendent’s Accountability Framework Task Force report is available on the Saint Paul Public Schools Web site at www.spps.org.
|
