Kaizen and accreditation

Any organization worth its weight in salt understands the value of self-study and responding to feedback from stakeholders. We are passionate advocates for social justice and the current state of Adult Education requires a hard look at our services to determine how we can improve. No longer are we chasing enrollment-based funding (ADA), and since we don’t earn money from participation, it’s about quality, not quantity. Statewide, adult schools are eliminating or reducing services as school districts continue to ‘flex’ adult school budgets. We must be nimble and ensure we’re serving our students’ needs with measurable outcomes.

Kaizen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen) is a philosophy of continuous improvement that I learned about in college, read about in a popular periodical a few years ago, and recently heard a colleague refer to regarding her adult school’s guiding principle.  The reason I mention Kaizen is that Berkeley Adult School is up for review by our accrediting agency, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (http://www.wascweb.org/). WASC accreditation is a self-study process which is laborious and has associated costs. All schools in BUSD are WASC accredited, as are all UC and State Universities.  Courses taken in WASC accredited institutions are recognized by a majority of private and public schools, and that’s important to our academic students, who may transition to University.

So, it is a process worth embracing for a variety of reasons. Burr, LaRanda and Mel will be leading this process, and we will be addressing our self-study in leadership and department meetings for the next twelve months. A Visiting Committee from WASC will spend 4 days at BAS in March 2012, reviewing our programs and checking for alignment with our self-study document, which we are now assembling. The self-study includes a comprehensive profile of BAS and identifies areas of growth with action plans facilitating improvement. We are looking forward to your participation and contribution to the accreditation process.