The
Challenge of Voluntary Accreditation
We accredit hospitals and
children’s mental health centres. What about
schools?
By Rosemarie Bahr
Eight
people have gathered in a meeting room at Rosseau
Lake College on a sunny October Sunday. Outside,
everyone else is admiring the fall colours. But these
eight educators – an accreditation team from the
Canadian Educational Standards Institute (CESI)
– barely have time to think about the scenery.
They will spend the next
three days looking at every aspect of this
100-student secondary school. "It’s like a
pregnancy. At first you’re excited. Then in the
last month anxiety starts to build and you want it to
come now rather than later," says headmaster
Greg Devenish.
The CESI accreditation team
assembles outside Rosseau Lake College at the start
of their visit. From the left in front are student
Yearmine Castel (back to camera), Elinor Cole, George
Rutherford, Solette Gelberg, Susan Collacott and
Padmini Kalyanam. In the back row are Brian Hedney,
Peter Hill, Carolyn Aylward-Viveros, Linda Leckie and
students Joshua Pearl and Todd Fraser.
Devenish thinks the
visit is only third in importance in the
accreditation process. For him, the first is the
self-evaluation the school does prior to the visit.
Second is the follow-up when the school acts on the
report’s recommendations and suggestions.
Rosseau Lake College has
already made changes, based on what it found out
during its year-long self-evaluation.
"We’ve already improved our communications
and done some work on safety issues, like having more
medical kits and training all the staff in CPR,"
says Devenish.
Usually, when we think
of accreditation, we think of hospitals, not schools.
Hospitals, nursing homes and similar care providers
can belong to the Canadian Council on Health Services
Accreditation, which sets standards and grants
accreditation. More recently, children’s mental
health centres and children’s aid societies in
Ontario have started to participate in an
accreditation process. Like other institutions that
care for children and vulnerable adults, they see
accreditation as a way of being accountable and
ensuring the delivery of good services.
Schools No
Different
"Schools are no
different than any other entity where you have a
group of human beings trained to do something special
and they’re delivering a service. If you stop
and think about it, it doesn’t matter where it
is, we evaluate and accredit other organizations, but
we don’t evaluate anything other than individual
teachers in public schools. We evaluate and accredit
hospitals. We don’t just look at nurses and
doctors and therapists, we look at the whole
institution to see if it’s providing good
service," says Solette Gelberg. Gelberg is executive director
of CESI and a member of the Council of the Ontario
College of Teachers.
The private schools
belonging to CESI – 29 in Ontario – go
through a rigorous accreditation process. CESI was
founded in 1986 to "develop and promote high
educational standards for schools in Canada and to
foster compliance thereto, while recognizing the
independence, integrity, and uniqueness of its
individual member schools." Member schools range
in size from 60 to 1,100 students.
The CESI process starts
with an extensive self-evaluation, which can take
three to four months. Using a set of guidelines, the
school community divides itself into teams to look
over its own operations. In this process, the teams
look into parts of the school in which they
don’t work, so they are not evaluating their own
department.
Thorough Review
With this report in
hand, a visiting team of seven to 12 people arrives
at the school on a Sunday afternoon. Until Wednesday,
they go to class, visit with students in the halls
and dormitories, talk with teachers, parents,
students and alumni, and meet with the school’s
board.
This visiting team will
include teachers, staff and heads of similar schools
and members of a faculty of education. There may also
be board members of other schools or someone from a
ministry of education in another province.
The team has 50 to 60
areas to check out, and they tackle them in small
groups. The groups will look at the school from top
to bottom, including the school’s objectives,
values, discipline, extra-curricular activities,
academic program, evaluation procedures, finances,
management, staffing policies, community relations,
admission procedures, governance, and physical
facilities.
Their report will
contain both recommendations, which the school must
fulfill, and suggestions. It will also mention areas
where the school is doing well. A recommendation
might be that the teachers get more professional
development. A suggestion could be that the school
consider setting up a professional development
committee to get input from their teachers.
The visiting team sends
the report to the CESI board along with its
recommendation on whether the school should get full
accreditation. The school then has 18 months to
fulfill any recommendations. The report helps a
school improve, plan, and generate new ideas.
Takes Courage
Natalie Little, a
26-year veteran of the public school system who now
is head of Bishop Strachan School in Toronto, has
been on both the giving and receiving end of a CESI
accreditation. She is impressed with the process:
"Any institution that wants to keep the best of
its traditions and move to being more innovative and
creative, and even be around in 20 years, should do
some serious soul searching. And one way to do that
is to bring in a group of outsiders. It takes an
incredible courage to do it, but it works."
While the CESI
accreditation is the most rigorous, some other
private schools go through a similar process. The 73
schools that belong to the Ontario Alliance of
Christian Schools call it an evaluation.
Communications director John Vanasselt says their
process evaluates the school’s financial
administration, recruitment, and involvement with the
community as well as instruction and written
curriculum. Visiting teams average three people,
including someone who has supervisory officer
qualifications, someone from a faculty of education
and an experienced principal.
Students canoe on Lake
Rosseau. The
accreditation team looks at all aspects of
the school.
Other private schools
are also moving to accreditation. Waldorf schools,
which have used a mentoring system to help new
schools prepare for membership in the Association of
Waldorf Schools in North America, recently began work
on establishing an accreditation process.
Montessori schools that
belong to the Canadian Council of Montessori
Administrators must now go through their new
accreditation process to become full members of the
council. Expanding their previous evaluation into a
full accreditation, according to CCMA secretary Terry
Gorrie, is "recognition that we as educators
must be more accountable, regardless of whether
we’re public or private."
Little
Regulation
Private schools, or
independent schools as many prefer to be called, are
not paid for by government, nor are they accountable
to it. Ministry of Education and Training involvement
is minimal. It publishes a list of private schools
(650), keeps basic statistics, such as how many
children attend private schools (75,000) and how many
people teach in them (9,000, of whom an estimated 80
per cent are College members).
This published list
includes a disclaimer: "... inclusion of a
private school in this directory does not imply that
the instruction it offers has been approved by the
ministry." The Ministry of Education and
Training may inspect a private secondary school that
has requested inspection in order to authorize the
principal to grant credits in subjects leading to the
Ontario Secondary School Diploma. The inspection
relates to the standard of instruction. The ministry
does not inspect health equipment nor practices
related to safety and staffing issues.
In other words, the
ministry inspects only schools that offer secondary
courses for credit.
In fact, the Ontario
Council of Independent Schools, an umbrella
organization representing private school
associations, last year suggested to the ministry
that an evaluation or accreditation process be used
to replace even these ministry inspections.
Accreditation
Spreading
Public schools, however,
are held accountable to the taxpayers and parents
through a variety of standards and undergo regular
inspections. But, even though public schools in
Ontario are more regulated than schools in the United
States, some public schools have already decided to
set their own standards and go through a process
similar to accreditation.
Paul Wightman, chair of
the school’s board, and headmaster Greg Devenish
talk with College Council member Solette Gelberg, who
is CESI’s executive director.
The North York Board of
Education started its quality assurance program in
the mid-80s. In the first year of a three-year cycle,
15 elementary schools participated, 15 secondary
schools in the next year, and 15 middle schools in
the third.
This program combines
quantitative data, in the form of a 40-question
survey to teachers, parents and students, and
qualitative data in the form of a school visit by a
review team.
The visiting team
consists of a trustee, a parent from that or another
school, a supervisory officer and outsiders –
perhaps someone who’s involved in quality
assurance at a large company. They will stay in the
school for three or four days, interviewing
individuals and groups and observing class and
extra-curricular activities.
Staff from the board
compile the report, using the information from the
questionnaire, the visiting team’s report, and
feedback from the school. Each school receives its
own report, also available to the public, complete
with commendations and recommendations.
The board uses the
information from all the schools evaluated and the
results of the board’s student testing programs
in math and literacy to give a full picture of the
quality of education across the system and progress
since the previous evaluation. Every year, each
school submits a report to the board, outlining what
it has done to follow up on the recommendations.
This year, the North
York Board is moving to self-evaluation. Schools will
evaluate themselves using a set of criteria developed
by the board and smaller review teams. These teams
will be made up mostly of people from within the
school. In addition, a small number of schools will
get an audit by an outside team.
Supporters of the
process say that accreditation – whether
it’s in public or private schools – is
about accountability and good education. Natalie
Little says, "All institutions should welcome it
because, as educators, we spend all our time
evaluating. We should then also welcome
evaluation."
Ruth Baumann, who does
government relations for the Ontario Teachers’
Federation, has a personal interest in accreditation,
sparked by her knowledge of the American system.
"In the U.S., where governments have never
occupied the policy and regulatory role in the
delivery of programs to the extent that provincial
ministries of education have, these accreditation
systems have provided a set of external benchmarks.
As governments here seem to be vacating that role,
having external benchmarks could become very
important."
