TFLGroup LLC

Local Accountability Systems Need to Facilitate Academic Achievement

Federal and state accountability programs are complex systems designed to monitor changes in student learning.  Local accountability systems serve a different and much more complicated purpose: facilitating student learning.  Local accountability programs need to meet specific community needs, yet be compatible with federal and state requirements.  We will work with local decision makers and stakeholder groups, as well as state officials, to help ensure that your accountability program is technically sound; politically viable; and useful to educators, parents, students, and other members of your community.

TFLGroup supports and works within the parameters established by the American Evaluation Association's Public Statement on Educational Accountability (www.eval.org/edac.statement.asp) and the Council of Chief State School Officers' publication, Attributes of Effective Formative Assessment (www.ccsso.org/publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=362).  We strongly encourage our clients to require full compliance with both sets of principles, regardless of what contractor they use to help them develop their local accountability systems.

Examples of services we offer to help schools and districts improve local accountability systems include:

• quantitatively demonstrating the relationship between teaching and learning activities, and student academic achievement
• building clients' internal evaluation and data utilization capacity (so you don't have to keep paying high-priced vendors and consultants!)
• conducting research into the alignment between local accountability practices and state and federal requirements
• equating local assessments so that measures of student growth are meaningful
• establishing how well performance on local tests predicts performance on state tests (predictive validity)