CHALLENGE:
The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC) is an independent agency created in 1970 by the Ryan Act and is the oldest of the autonomous state standards boards in the nation. While CCTC has great responsibility in ensuring state standards are met, CCTC is also responsible for providing oversight to ensure that educators across the state have proper credentials to work in the classroom.
At the beginning of each school year, educators are assigned to one or more courses that they will be teaching. If the “teacher of record” does not have the proper credentials to teach a course, or there is no teacher of record, then the course is flagged as a misassignment. Prior to Kiefer’s engagement with CCTC, the process of identifying misassignments required a school or district employee to compare each teacher’s assignments with their credentials. This process was so time consuming that schools were only monitored once in a four-year cycle.
ACTION:
Kiefer Consulting worked with CCTC to develop a Custom .NET solution, the California State Assignment Accountability System (CalSAAS), to modernize the process of identifying misassignments in the State of California’s educational system.
Assignment data from California Department of Education (CDE) is compared with accreditation data from CCTC to generate a list of exceptions or potential misassignments. In order to compare CDE assignments to CCTC accreditations, the solution maps important features of every possible course to the credential required. The CalSAAS team leveraged expertise in database design, data management, and .NET development.
This CalSAAS solution also features a .NET application that allows users from school districts across the state to log in and process these exceptions. Exceptions are identified as true misassignments or some other determination and are provided to the County Board of Education for review. District users can include information to justify a determination or indicate that the exception was in error to improve the system in the future. After reviewing the district’s submittal, the county then submits their data to CCTC which is used for reporting to multiple audiences.
Kiefer worked closely with the teams at CCTC to collaborate on the solution, design, and user interface. The system was built to be both flexible and scalable and includes attributes that allow for administrators to update the CalSAAS solution without .Net or SQL experience.
RESULTS:
In the past, the ability to track exceptions and potential misassignments was a manual and time-consuming process. The solution that Kiefer and CCTC built allows the commission to leverage the power of a relational data management system to generate exceptions or potential misassignments. The solution also enables the districts to review exceptions and provide justification and documentation for the County Board of Education and CCTC to review. The solution enables the team to identify misassignments faster, communicate more effectively between levels of the education system and enables CCTC to report with greater frequency.
We were happy to partner with the Kiefer team during this project. They quickly got up to speed on the requirements of the project, and often found innovative ways to meet our objectives. They were professional, personable, and responsive throughout its entirety. We’d be happy to collaborate with them again in the future.
The CalSAAS solution provides CCTC with improved efficiencies and reporting that were simply not possible without optimizing and automating the processes for identifying exceptions or misassignments.