Looking Beyond Accreditation To Include Assessment Reform

My (James) own experience with rethinking assessment came at the Rabat American School over fifteen years ago. At the time, I had the typical bins for grading whose weights had been set arbitrarily in the 90s when I first started teaching. I had 40% for projects and papers, 30% for tests, 20% for quizzes, and 10% for homework. Everything was graded on a percentage scale, and I assumed the math was inviolate and absolutely sacrosanct. Maybe I could fudge a 79.5% into an 80, but the calculation in the online gradebook was the ultimate benign arbiter. I had assigned a paper and a student approached me and asked if I could move the assignment from the projects and papers category to the test category, because doing so would change his overall grade from an 88% to a 91%. All of a sudden, the math didn’t add up.

On my (Vickie) own journey, leading two international schools to reform their assessment policies and staying active in the assessment reform community, there were lots of lessons to learn about the process of reforming a system, and also the tremendous amount of complications that result when you pull on that thread. Schools must go slow, spend lots of time focusing on the why, and allow for the community to think through all the implications. Here’s one; in the United States, car insurance companies will give school age drivers a “good grades discount;” but if GPAs and A-F grades go away, that is going to cost parents money because insurance companies aren’t necessarily aware what a 3 or “Meeting” means. Going slow and engaging with all the stakeholders before any concrete decisions are made is essential.

Most international schools are accredited by one of the frameworks that exist. The (usually) two year long process involving the self-study, internal reflection and review, goal setting, and external team visits is intended to result in robust conversations about child safety, wellbeing and development, teaching and learning, governance structures, facilities, and finance among others. Frequently (usually) something will come up in the accreditation process that will require the school to change some long-standing practice; be it academic, structural, safety/equity, or organizational. The value or need for accreditation is so high that a Head of School is empowered to go in-front of the faculty, parents, and board to state that the financial or time investment must be done in order to achieve the accreditation. Accreditation can bulldoze objections out of the way in support of a positive change, which in other situations might involve significant resistance to the change and result in stalled movement forward. What if we did that, but for assessment reform purposes?

A quick review of some major accrediting frameworks gives some examples of what they say specifically with regard to assessment practices:  

• “Assessment should provide evidence of ‘high-quality learning,’ and schools must use assessment results to reflect on and refine the curriculum.”
• “Assessments must be “frequent, embedded, and integral” to learning, used by teachers and students for feedback and improvement.”
• “Requires teachers to implement assessments that clearly state learner outcomes and grading criteria in advance; assessment results guide curriculum review.”
• “Schools must use appropriate assessment strategies to measure progress; results must inform curriculum/instruction revision.”

Note that they all seem agnostic as to what type of grading system is used. There is no requirement that a school be standards based or even that they move away from a traditional gradebook. So while the overall accreditation process can help school leaders move some goals forward, there isn’t the same catalyst in the accreditation process to do assessment reform specifically. The same would hold true for other initiatives like sustainability or project-based learning. For those, there are additional accrediting bodies like the Eco-Schools Initiative which can help drive significant environmental changes under the direction of pursuing the Green Flag certification.

Recently, groups working at the forefront of assessment reform have begun developing targeted recognition and accreditation processes for schools implementing innovative assessment frameworks. These initiatives offer badges or tiered accreditation aligned to clearly defined best practices in standards-based or competency-based assessment. Rather than replacing traditional accreditation bodies, they are designed to harness the structure and influence of accreditation to drive focused, meaningful reform in specific areas of school practice.

Similar to the microcredentials movement currently underway, we could envision a future where a school engages in multiple accreditation processes in line with their strategic plan to earn recognition as a Child Safeguarding school or an AI Safe Practices school as examples, rather than just memberships in organizations. The accreditation process involves reflection, an honest evaluation from a critical friend, and feedback, all of which are also best practices in assessment in general.