Evolving

Excellence

Resource Library

Schooling is evolving

As schooling evolves, authorizing policies and practices also need to evolve. Continuing to enforce narrow and ineffective ways of evaluating learning opportunities and school quality limit who opens new schools and their ability to meet community aspirations. We need to create a more vibrant array of excellent learning opportunities: proven approaches, quality innovations (including those emerging from the pandemic), and new ways of organizing teaching and learning not yet thought of.

School oversight systems must embrace rigor, flexibility, innovation, and diversity—not burdensome bureaucracy—in the ways it defines excellence in order for more and different educational opportunities to deliver on community aspirations and needs.

Communities want schools to be accountable for high standards of literacy and numeracy and other goals that measure student preparedness for their chosen futures.

From Our Plan. Over the next three years, NACSA will listen and respond to the needs of communities by creating:

Here are some of the things we’ve done to better listen to and act with communities to evolve definitions of academic excellence:

Multiple Measures – NACSA’s school accountability framework that uses both widely-used, normed performance indicators AND other metrics that indicate student readiness for their chosen futures.

Readiness Assessment – Working together, authorizers and schools determine how ready they are to implement Multiple Measures.

Credibility Tool – Ensure school and/or authorizer measurement tool has credibility with internal and external stakeholders.

Examples – Here are some authorizers already thinking about Multiple Measures with their portfolios

Rethinking the New School Application – NACSA’s recommendations on how to evolve the new school application, creating capacity for new, innovative ways of thinking and learning

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