Accountability Pillar

Stakeholder Advisory Committee Operating Guidelines

A transparent process

  • Expectations from jurisdictions and from the ministry should be transparent and readily accessible.
  • Criteria for initiating improvement actions should be clearly understood.
  • Jurisdictions are expected to share their results and improvement plans with their communities.

Focus on achievement

  • The province's focus will be on jurisdictions which, in turn, will focus on school performance.
  • Priority should be on "achievement" instead of "improvement" (the emphasis then would see how improvement has impacted achievement).
  • The evaluation of categories and measures are based on both improvement and achievement. Improvement focuses on performance trends over time and achievement focuses on actual results compared to standards.

Holistic approach to evaluation

  • Measures are considered in categories (e.g. student achievement, opportunities to learn).
  • Each category and its measures will be reviewed when determining whether or not department assistance is required (as opposed to the aggregate across all measures).
  • Improvement is evaluated by comparing the jurisdiction's current result against the previous 3-year average using a statistical test.
  • Achievement is evaluated by comparing the jurisdiction's current result against a fixed set of provincial standards.
  • Both the improvement and achievement component should contain multiple levels.
  • Improvement and achievement results are combined to provide an evaluation for each measure. An overall evaluation is calculated for each category by averaging the individual evaluations for each measure in the group.
  • The Accountability Pillar report contains baseline data; the rolling three year average; current results; the evaluation of both improvement and achievement; and the overall evaluation of individual measures and groupings of measures.
  • The report should contain the provincial mean or average for information.

An ongoing, collaborative process

  • Jurisdictions should be initiating improvement actions on an ongoing basis, however, when the point has been reached when collaborative between the jurisdiction and the department should occur, it can take many forms including:
    • Department toolkit for school improvement.
    • Involvement of external experts/specialists.
    • Involvement with a post-secondary institution.
  • Jurisdictions may approach Alberta Education for assistance at any time.

All jurisdictions can succeed

  • Since Alberta has a world-class education system, there should be no theoretical or practical limit to the numbers of jurisdictions that can achieve the top level of evaluation.
  • There should be a limited number of jurisdictions needing department assistance.