Education Week - March 18, 2015 - Special Report - S5

EDUCATION WEEK MARCH 18, 2015
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The Chief Academic Officer > www.edweek.org/go/CAO
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Q&As: Challenges and
Responsibilities for CAOs
Vickie Murillo, the chief academic and accountability officer for
the Kansas City, Mo., schools, finds herself in a critical position
only eight months into her new job in a district that lost its
accreditation in 2012. After showing moderate gains in student
achievement in recent years, the 16,700-student district
was granted provisional accreditation in August. To earn full
accreditation, the district must continue showing improvement
in student achievement. Ms. Murillo's job as chief academic
and accountability officer is vital for achieving that goal.
Education Week Contributing Writer Michelle R. Davis recently
spoke with Ms. Murillo about the challenges of improving
academics in a district that is struggling to build a better future
for its students.
How have your past experiences in education prepared you for this
challenge?
Everything that I've done in my educational career has prepared me
for this role. I have a lot of history with the district. I came to the district
in 1997 and served as a teacher, principal, and in several areas at the
district level. Those experiences have given me the confidence to guide
others through challenges they might face. I've been able to watch and
measure things that did work well and things that did not work well,
and to use that background knowledge to make good decisions as we
move forward.
What is the role of the chief academic and accountability officer in your
district?
My role is a little different because besides being the chief academic
officer, my title is also chief accountability officer. In our district, [the
superintendent] sets our vision. My role is to drive the educational performance
of the district and to provide leadership and vision, and to
make strategic decisions for curriculum, instruction, professional development,
assessment, and school improvement initiatives.
I primarily hold our district departments that support our academic
services accountable, as well as making sure the academic performance
of all schools are on point or increasing toward the targets. So
I really work around just that academic side, and the accountability
piece added to my title is about monitoring and really ensuring that
what we say we're doing, we are doing.
As the district seeks full accreditation, how are you emphasizing student
achievement?
We are really focused on student growth in our district and our students
moving out of one achievement level to the next. So we're looking at all students.
Before, when we were under ayp status, sometimes we were only looking
at students we moved into proficient and advanced [categories]. Really,
in the accreditation process, we are looking at growth, progress, and our students
moving into higher levels of achievement.
How do you make sure that other departments are on board with the
goals and strategies?
We start by setting our expectations for every building. At the beginning
of every year, our buildings receive their building-level goals. Then we have
to monitor. [But] instead of monitoring that is punitive, our monitoring is so
that we can provide the additional support and assistance to those principals,
instructional coaches, and classroom teachers so they can move those
students ahead.
How do you do that monitoring?
We use a walk-through form [that guides district leaders in evaluating
classroom learning, student engagement, and teacher effectiveness as they
do on-site observations] that's aligned to our curriculum framework and our
building-level expectations. I have those walk-throughs pulled at the end
of each month. We pull that data and we discuss it, and we look at it from
several angles: We're looking at it to see how our teachers are doing with
the instructional piece and where they are with the curriculum framework.
Then we also take student data and look at the growth of our students on
quarterly assessments and our district-level assessments. We also look at the
supplemental programs we use to help our students who are below grade
level. We look at the time students are on those supplemental programs by
building, by grade level, and their passing rate.
How do you ensure everyone is working together?
The collaboration piece is pretty much a must for this position. It's like I
see all the departments as a big puzzle and pieces. I have to see them as a
whole part of the team and not as separate departments that provide only
one service. The goal for me is not to allow anyone to chart their own course,
but to see how all the pieces come together for success. l
The 40,000-student Aurora, Colo., district is in its first year
of fully implementing a revamped organizational structure
designed to encourage more support for schools and educators
and to encourage lifelong learning among students and
teachers. Chief Academic Officer John Youngquist, who has
spent a career in education that spans nearly all levels, said
the new system splits the district into five P-20 community
clusters designed to foster closer cooperation and partnerships
and to be more responsive in providing support and resources.
The P-20 refers to the district's work encompassing all levels of
education from preschool, to students seeking college credits, to
educators working on advanced degrees.
Mr. Youngquist has been a high school teacher, a middle
school counselor, an elementary school principal, and an area
superintendent. He has worked for a national educational foundation,
and in higher education with principal-training programs. Since he
took the Aurora job in 2013, that breadth of experience, he said, is
proving to be very valuable in his role as a cao.
Education Week Contributing Writer Michelle R. Davis recently spoke
with Mr. Youngquist about this new organizational structure, its impact
on schools, and how it is shaping his job.
How does this new organizational structure benefit the district and affect
your job?
We have five P-20 learning communities, supported by five P-20 learning
community directors, each of them supervising about 10 schools, and each of
them leading cross-functional support teams that are representative of the
resources we provide for teachers and principals.
While I'm the cao for Aurora public schools, I am also the head of our division
of equity and learning, which includes the supervision of the Englishlanguage-acquisition
department, student services, including exceptional
student services, health services for students, mental health and counseling,
and our gifted and talented program. I also supervise the area that we call
teaching and learning, which includes professional learning, and ed tech,
early-childhood education, library services, and educator effectiveness.
PAGE S6 >
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Education Week - March 18, 2015 - Special Report

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