About the Author: Gene Wenger is the Associate Executive Director for NCA COS. He supervises the Transitions pilot and can be reached at gwenger@nca.asu.edu.

Have you heard your NCA colleagues discussing the "Transitions Endorsement?"  Maybe you attended a workshop at the annual meeting or read something about it in a newsletter.  This short article is intended to share some information about the endorsement that was gathered from schools that are serving as pilot sites.

Currently over 150 schools in 13 states have accepted the challenge to pilot the Transitions Endorsement.  In some districts all schools are involved in the pilot and in other districts only one school is participating.  The pilot also includes some vocational schools and other schools that serve a special population of students.

The Transitions Endorsement is a school improvement model based upon the credentialing of individual students.  Schools pursuing the endorsement must focus their attention on helping students make successful transitions from school-to-school and school-to-career.  One of the basic tenants of the endorsement is that "schools must communicate openly and consistently with sender and receiver schools so that expectations for student performance are clearly understood by everyone."  In the language of Transitions this is called articulation.  Teachers, administrators, and community members representing all school levels must work together continuously to build the structures needed to help students make successful transitions to the next level.

Articulation is an easy thing to talk about but a rather difficult thing to accomplish.  However, schools participating in the pilot are finding ways to communicate effectively and work together to enhance student performance.  The following are comments from personnel in pilot schools:

• We have articulation meetings six times a year with our middle school and alternative high school.
• The transitions process provides a means for regular articulation between grade levels and between school buildings.  We now do a better job of documenting meetings that have a clear focus.
• The process has begun to link our buildings together to better function as a school district rather than individual buildings with no connection to the rest of the district.
• The program has moved us to work much more closely with our middle and high school in designing student outcomes.
• These meetings [articulation] have raised the professionalism of our staff.  Meetings took place between parents and teachers about the assessments used.  Parents actively participated in offering ideas of support for the plan.
• We have experienced a large increase in communication from one grade level to another as well as among departments at the secondary level.
• Each spring we hold transition meetings to discuss each individual student's strengths and weaknesses.  These discussions are held with the sending and receiving teachers.  Teachers know which students they will have in their classroom in the fall and use the summer months to prepare for their arrival.
• We have developed transitions folders and conducted follow-up articulation meetings throughout the year.

A second major tenant of the endorsement is that of credentialing, and it represents a major challenge for school personnel.  Students are to be credentialed in three areas: academics, career awareness, and employability skills.  An intervention plan is developed for students who are not credentialed in one or more areas.  The school is responsible for establishing appropriate performance levels for each credentialing area and for determining appropriate assessment measures.  At the secondary level the Commission on Schools approves the assessments.

The following is an example of one district's requirements for credentialing secondary students.  These requirements are differentiated for three groups of students, and credentialing decisions are based on multiple measures using a combination of national, state, and local assessments.

Credentialing Requirements

High School Articulation Committee

Areas for Credentialing

School to Work: Based on ACT Work Keys   Levels

School to Technological or Two-Year College: Work Key

School to Four-Year University

In Transitions, the focus on credentialing individual students causes schools to rethink all aspects of the school program.  School personnel report that they are reexamining scheduling practices, curriculum, instruction, assessment, goals, and other issues:

• It [Transitions] causes us to identify problem areas for students thus encouraging staff to analyze curriculum and assessments.
• Transitions has caused us to reassess our evaluation techniques.
• The credentialing process has forced all of us to take a closer look at our students' current levels of performance and identify areas that need support. We have developed powerful school improvement strategies in each of the credentialing areas.
• We have become much more cognizant of the importance of intentionally teaching such things as career and employability skills.  These were taught in a haphazard fashion prior to Transitions but are now a regular component of the curriculum.
• Entrance and exit goals have been established at specific levels.
• We have created an academic enrichment, support, and remediation plan and developed an academic enrichment and remediation center to support students.
• We wrote and implemented intervention plans for all students not yet credentialed this year.

NCA plans to grant the endorsement to some pilot schools in spring 2001.  Other pilot schools are expected to achieve the endorsement in subsequent years.  Peer review teams have been collecting and examining information from pilot schools throughout the process.  This information has been forwarded to the respective state committee for review.  Before the endorsement is granted by the commission, the school must provide evidence that the following three criteria have been met:

Schools participating as Transitions pilots have been willing to travel an uncharted path to help determine the future direction of the endorsement.  There is little doubt that parents and the general public view preparing students for successful transitions from school-to-school and from school to adult life as a significant role of the school.

Note: The information shared in this article is not intended to provide the reader with a comprehensive description of the Transitions endorsement.  Specific information about the endorsement is found in a draft handbook, The Road to Transitions, available through the NCA Commission on Schools.  The reader can also access Transitions information from the NCA web site at http://www.ncacasi.org/