THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT / THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK / ALBANY, NY 12234

 

TO:	The Honorable the Members of the Board of Regents
FROM:	James A. Kadamus
COMMITTEE:	EMSC-VESID
TITLE OF ITEM:	Policy Review of Comprehensive Planning Requirements
DATE OF SUBMISSION:	January 5, 2004
PROPOSED HANDLING:	Discussion
RATIONALE FOR ITEM:	Review of Regents Policy
STRATEGIC GOAL:	Goals 1 and 2
AUTHORIZATION(S):

 

SUMMARY:

 

            Attached is a review of the Department’s planning initiatives and their relationship to the June 2003 report to the Governor and the Legislature on SED’s multiple plan, application and reporting requirements.  The State Legislature has signaled its intent to reduce mandates for planning and reporting for schools by requiring the Department to study the matter and make recommendations.  The Department took this task seriously and recommended an aggressive approach to consolidate many plans into a single district school improvement plan.

 

            Evaluations have shown that comprehensive planning is critical for managing change that supports improvement in student achievement.  The purpose of this report is to increase understanding of the value of comprehensive district results-based planning for school improvement.

 

            Next steps include continuing Department work on the plan consolidation initiative, engaging critical stakeholders to provide practitioner input, and providing an increased level of planning support to the State’s highest-need districts.  The Regents are asked to confirm the proposed next steps. 

 

 

 

Attachment

POLICY REVIEW OF COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING REQUIREMENTS

 

 

 

1.         DRIVING FORCES FOR COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING

 

a.         Results-based accountability

 

To meet State and federal requirements, school districts must report disaggregated student results, meet attainable performance targets for student learning, and comply with increasingly strict interventions if they do not meet specified targets.  Greater sophistication in technology applications has provided increased opportunities for collecting data, sharing information, and viewing individual school improvement initiatives in a comprehensive fashion.  Our data collection initiatives have expanded our capacity for data analyses.  With implementation of the statewide unique student identifier and linked data warehouses, similar opportunities will be available to all schools and districts.  High performing and better-resourced schools and districts are already using advanced data tools at the local level to analyze teaching and learning for greater accountability.  These concurrent reforms have placed an unprecedented pressure on the education system to focus on data for continuous school improvement.

 

b.         Mandate relief - streamlining and consolidating multiple planning and reporting requirements

 

The Commissioner was required under Education Law to develop a report by June 1, 2003, that listed all the plans, applications, and reports the Department requires school districts to prepare.  Approximately 125 different reporting requirements were identified.  The report recommended that "... all existing school district planning and reporting requirements be replaced with a new ... comprehensive, streamlined system aligned with the expectations inherent in a results-oriented, standards-based education system."  This new system would emphasize results over process; promote data-driven decision-making at State and local levels; support improvements in data collection systems to reduce redundancy and make data more accessible to multiple users; and contribute to the practice of sustained and continuous school improvement.  A cross-agency committee is working on implementing the recommendations of this report, including considering those requirements the Department might abandon.  It is also looking at a phased approach, both in terms of interim steps before the unique student identifier system is fully phased in, and a tiered approach closely tied to school and district performance once that system is available.

 

c.         Ensuring that all system components, stakeholders and the public are focused on school improvement and student achievement

 

While school improvements have been achieved in the past through the independent implementation of various programmatic elements, gains have been uneven.  Historically underrepresented groups have been least well served by this approach, and the gap in student achievement has remained the same or widened over the past decade.  Without results-based planning, school efforts to improve student achievement are likely to be random, fragmented, misdirected, or futile.  Without system-wide planning, separate and even related efforts can become duplicative or contradictory.  Publicly available data can be a powerful tool to support improved instruction, but it is not sufficient.  A comprehensive planning system is a necessary component in knowing what to do about that data.  Schools and districts must know how to analyze data; how to prioritize their needs; how to direct limited resources to address the most compelling needs; how to implement those changes most likely to support improved teaching and learning; and how to evaluate the effectiveness of those changes.  Such data analysis is necessary to guide professionals, parents, and community partners in identifying causes for low performance, formulating goals and strategies to address these causes, targeting resources, and assessing how well they sustain their focus and accomplish their goals.  Public discussion on improvement goals builds stakeholder and community investment in schools and increases the support needed to implement and assess those improvements.

 

d.         Lessons learned from current planning efforts

 

The Department has supported an array of comprehensive planning initiatives:  the Comprehensive District Education Plan (CDEP), the District Comprehensive Education Plan (DCEP) in New York City, the Comprehensive Education Plan [school-based], VESID’s Comprehensive System of Personnel Development (CSPD), Shared Decision-Making (CR 100.11), Academic Intervention Services (AIS), Professional Development Plans (PDP), Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), Operating Standards Aid, Local Assistance Plans, and others.  These initiatives have yielded rich information about the effective use of planning.  It is clear that results-based planning can support school improvement.  We have also learned that certain components are critical for success:  comprehensive plans must be focused on results, not processes; leadership that facilitates shared decision-making yields greater long-term stability; planning must be followed by implementation and the ongoing evaluation of results; and broad-based and significant involvement of key stakeholders--teachers, parents, school staff and administrators, community members, higher education representatives--is critical. 

 

2.         DEPARTMENT RESPONSE

 

The State Legislature has signaled its intent to reduce mandates for planning and reporting for schools by requiring the Department to study the matter and make recommendations.  The Department took this task seriously, consulted with many groups and then recommended an aggressive approach to consolidate many plans into a single district school improvement plan.  The context for planning and shared decision-making has changed in light of the results-based accountability requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Regents emphasis on closing the gap in student achievement.  School leadership must play an important role in bringing together an array of stakeholders, including teachers, parents and the community at- large, in creating a comprehensive school improvement plan for the district.  The Department has created models for comprehensive plans through the Comprehensive District Education Plan (CDEP) model upstate and the District Comprehensive Education Plan (DCEP) model used in New York City.  We can build on these models and partnership agreements with the Big 4 districts to design a statewide system for comprehensive planning that meets federal and State requirements, consolidates many separate plans and serves as a tool for school improvement.

 

The Regents can take a series of steps to make all of this happen:

 

1.   Advocate for implementation of the Department's recommendations to the Legislature on plan consolidation and mandate relief.

 

2.   Engage key organizations and groups that have a strong interest in comprehensive results-based planning, mandate relief and shared decision-making to join in this advocacy.

 

3.   The Department will design models for comprehensive educational improvement plans which are based on best practice for planning and shared decision-making.  This should be done in consultation with the field.  The Department will use statewide technical assistance networks that support high need districts to implement a system of support for comprehensive, results-based educational improvement planning for these districts.

 

4.   Contingent on legislative action, the Regents would develop a statewide requirement for all districts to have a comprehensive educational improvement plan, but one that gives districts with high performance greater flexibility in how to meet that requirement.  Districts with low performance would be supported by the Department in using State models for results-based comprehensive planning to support school improvement.

 

 

The Regents are asked to discuss these four steps and to confirm them.  Department staff will then engage in implementation, along with the Regents, in order to design the new statewide system of comprehensive planning.