North Dakota’s Department of Public Instruction has become the first state K through 12 education agency to earn national accreditation from Cognia. Cognia is a nonprofit that promotes school improvement in more than 90 countries, and its accreditation is required for schools in many states. North Dakota doesn’t require educational entities to be accredited, but the Department of Public Instruction opted to anyway.
"We're entering a second decade where schools have been required to undergo this continuous improvement process and have the Cognia accreditation reviews. So that's why we felt as an educational entity that it was important that we do the same process, engage in the same work, and self-evaluation with an external evaluator coming in to assist us to provide the accreditation that we were asking our schools to do."
State School Superintendent Kirsten Baesler says the process identified the department’s strengths and weaknesses.
"One of the things that really jumped out for me, was one of the first strengths that the review results revealed, and that was, I love the words that they used — developing and nurturing an authentic environment for an unrelenting focus on children. That came through so loud and clear. It is deeply important to our 86-person team at the department to ensure that everyone knows that every decision we make, every conversation we have, is an unrelenting and unapologetic commitment to our students."
Baesler says the department’s leadership will soon meet about the four key areas for improvement for NDDPI to address in the future. They plan to focus on two of the issues.
Baeslers says there are two things that she’d like to work on.
"I really want to focus in on the coordination of determining the effective investments that we are engaging in in North Dakota and in our North Dakota schools. I would also like to focus on our communication, to really ensure that the public in general and our school community understand the expectations that we have collectively as a state for student achievement."