As a school leader, it can sometimes feel as if you are caught between a rock and a hard place.

On one side, you're facing pressure from the community, the state Department of Education - and even the media - to increase staff accountability for student achievement in your school or district. On the other, you know that 75% of all legal claims brought against K-12 institutions are raised by employees - many of whom allege some form due process or Constitutional rights violation before, during or after disciplinary action.

This seemingly no-win situation has led many school leaders to conclude that staff should only be held accountable for the most egregious offenses. If the mission of your school or district is to ensure success for all students, nothing could be further from the truth.

Whether they ultimately result in employee discipline or not, the research is clear: Instances of substandard performance or employee misconduct can negatively impact student achievement on either a direct or an indirect basis. In fact, performance and/or conduct issues are often found to be undermining school improvement or reform initiatives in buildings designated as persistently "underperforming" or "non- performing" by their respective state departments of education - and even in some otherwise "performing" schools struggling to demonstrate consistent year-over-year student achievement gains

The question isn't whether or not corrective and/or disciplinary action can or should be taken to address substandard performance or employee misconduct - but how to do so in an effective and defensible manner. One well-established best practice solution to this problem is to develop, adopt and maintain an enterprise-class Code of Employee Conduct (COEC).

A well-conceived COEC is a dynamic accountability framework that not only establishes the ethical climate of a school or district for staff, but also clearly communicates the action plans that will be put into motion when the code is violated. A basic COEC contains the following key components at a minimum:

	A defined purpose for the employee disciplinary process
	A summary of roles and responsibilities for employee discipline within the school or district
	A structured catalog of valid and enforceable grounds for disciplinary action
	Alignments for each of these grounds to applicable federal/state/local law, civil statute and Governing Board policy
	Examples and student achievement impacts for each COEC violation
	A meaningful definition of the each type of employee discipline that may result when the COEC is violated
	An outline of the procedural workflow associated with each type of employee discipline by staff classification
	The due process considerations associated with each type of employee discipline before, during and after disciplinary action
	Progressive discipline matrices designed to reduce the potential for disciplinary bias
	Documentation and other essential decision support examples associated with each type of employee discipline in use

Many school leaders mistakenly believe that their employee handbooks or negotiated agreements constitute a proper COEC; however, as of 2009, even around 90% of these key documents were found to be non-existent, outdated, underdeveloped, inconsistent with those of peer institutions or redundant upon external review.

A growing number of state legislatures are mandating that their schools and districts adopt and maintain a common COEC based upon a "consensus" set ethical standards. A proper COEC not only equips school leaders with the ability to address cases of substandard performance or employee misconduct in an effective, consistent and defensible manner, but also directly supports the "highly qualified educator" staff accountability mandates outlined within the Race to the Top initiative (RTTT), the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund Program (SFSFP) as authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).

Employee handbooks and negotiated agreements are informed by a valid and enforceable COEC - they are not substitutes for one. Is your COEC as effective and defensible as it needs to be in today's K-12 education environment?

If not, UpSlope Solutions is here to help. As a national leader in education policy analysis, student achievement-focused instructional design and School Improvement Plan (SIP) development, UpSlope Solutions has partnered with hundreds of public school districts and charter organizations in their efforts to put accountability related research into practice since 1994.

The company currently provides the following COEC services and products:

Code of Employee Conduct (COEC) Consulting. Prefer to have your code development facilitated by UpSlope? The company will work directly with the designated members of your leadership team to guide the entire code construction process in a well-defined five step process.