The main challenge that Rocky Road School District is currently facing is the several lawsuits from former parents and staff. As well as the lack of team work that is shown within the district. Having a meeting with all Principals in the Rocky Road district is a most. Negotiation of teacher’s contracts and the hiring of new qualified teachers which will help assist the testing scores for the district. Giving parents a sense of comfort that their children are being well educated is a key challenge. My main challenge will be getting all parties involved in the movement to “Strive for Excellence.” Our main concern is getting faculty, staff, student, parents and the community working together to make Rocky Road School District successful, it takes a team to fix such a messy situation.
My three year plan is called the Strive for Excellence plan. For the first two year I will be focusing on the decline of test scores for the last three years. By making all staff views all 2,800 students that were below average for all three years. Requiring mandatory training for all teachers and staff should be complete upon reviewing data. So they are able to identify their student’s specific strengths and weakness. The teacher will know where they need to concentrate their attention. (Sue W. Astley, 2016) School improvement is an evolving process that takes constant progress monitoring and constant input. A special computer-based program is needed in Rocky Road School District to pull up records of any student or classroom more efficiently. This will also assist with the monitoring progress over the two years. A committee of parents and staff will be created to better understand the data, come up with methods to increase scores and to maintain the...
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... required to regularly progress monitor each student, work one on one with all students at least once a month, assign students strategies and assignments to boost fluency and comprehension.
With the support of the district, administers, faculty, staff, students and parents I can turn this around within my five year contract. By making sure our teachers have prior training, resources and the knowledge to educate the students of Rocky Road School District. By creating and using a computer based program that will measure the progress for all students in the district. Interventions will be put in place for students who are struggling in reading and mathematics. The district will fund several teachers to tutor needy students before and after school. The plan will be in place for two years and will be up for review to be revised occurring to the test scores at the time.
I had the pleasure of being able to shadow Superintendent Shirley Hall of the Maplewood School District. Ms. Hall took the reins of the district over in 2012 from a very popular superintendent who was credited with making great strides within the district. Although Ms. Hall had very large shoes to fill, she seems to be doing it with grace and enthusiasm. She credits the previous superintendent with making systemic changes and establishing the overall forward momentum of the district, but recognizes that she cannot rest on past success. Her goal is to take the district to the next level of educational excellence by focusing her and her administrative team's efforts on the P.E.L.P. coherence model from Harvard University. This model focuses the leadership's attention on the interdependence of the various aspects of their school district and how they reinforce one another to support the implementation of an improvement strategy. One of Ms. Hall's mantras was change, but not just for change sake, deep change for sustained improvement. Therefore, although Ms. Hall's predecessor was able to put the district on the right path, Ms. Hall has taken the baton and run with it; establishing her own style and path to excellence.
Thornton Fractional South High School represents a diverse school building in the South Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. We consist of a traditional 9th through 12th grade building with the exception of busing students to the District 215 Tech Center for vocational classes. We share these resources with our sister school TF North. Although we consistently outperform TFN, we are behind the state averages on both the ACT and the PSAE. On the ACT, we are below the state average on the composite score as well as on all three recorded sub-categories. We were closest to the state average in Science and the furthest in Reading. As for the PSAE test to measure those students meeting and exceeding standards, we are again behind the state average. TFS averaged 40.5% of students tested to meet or exceed standards. Meanwhile, the State of Illinois average was 53%. Currently, we are on the Academic Watch Status year 2. We were unable to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) or the Safe Harbor Target Goal for Reading and Mathematics which are the two target areas. Our goal as a school is to reach the AYP and attempt to reach and exceed the state averages on the ACT and PSAE.
Applying Figure 1.1 from Victoria Bernhardt’s (2013) book Data Analysis for Continuous School Improvement it is this evaluator’s opinion that Portage High School is at a crossroads as a school of compliance and a school of continuous improvement (p. 4). Of the nine area of evaluation, Portage marks five in the area of compliance and four in the area of continuous improvement. Hence, the assessment is that Portage High School sits firmly as a school focused on compliance. This is a strong reflection of the building principal that feels that the use of data is wasteful endeavor. According the principal, “The experts in our building guide our processes; data does not drive our school. It’s only purpose is to determine
One part of the HSTW framework is a set of 10 Key Practices that each participating site implements by developing and carrying out a customized action plan for school improvement (SREB 1999). Kaufman et al. (2000) used existing HSTW data to analyze the impact of 6 clusters representing HSTW's 10 Key Practices. They concluded that achievement gains in science, reading, and math were correlated with the proportion of students meeting HSTW curriculum standards and with the amount of time students spent talking to their guidance counselors and teachers about their school program. They also concluded that the proportion of students perceiving their academic and CTE teachers working together to improve students' math, reading, and writing skills was correlated with achievement gains in those three areas. This Brief provides practical examples of approaches HSTW sites have used to move toward HSTW curriculum standards, provide students with guidance, and allow academic and CTE teachers to work together.
A Blueprint for Reform is the title of President Barack Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s proposal to Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This Act will essentially replace the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001(NCLB) and any subsequent documents used in place of NCLB. In 2009, Congress enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in response to the “great recession” of 2008. One of the many objectives of this act was to invest in and reform education focusing on four areas: (1) Improving teachers and principals in every school: (2) Providing information to families and educators to increase student learning (3) Implementing college and career-ready standards; (4) Addressing Americas lowest-performing schools. The blueprint sets out five key priorities to address the four areas set out in the ARRA: (1) College- and Career-Ready Students;(2) Great Teachers and Leaders in Every School;(3) Equity and Opportunity for All Students;(4) Raise the Bar and Reward Excellence;(5) Promote Innovation and Continuous Improvement.
... past decade has not only affected teachers and valuable elective programs, but mostly importantly the education of today’s youth. The Georgia school districts have exhausted almost every way to make up for the billions of dollars of lost state financial support and they have reached the tipping point. Since over 9,000 teachers have lost their jobs, students are being forced into already bulging classes where they do not receive the kind of individual attention needed in order to boost student achievement. If Georgia leaders expect student achievements to improve, they must invest the necessary economic resources needed to achieve this goal. At the end of the day, one of the most important things in life is a good education, so we need to start putting more money into the K-12 school funding and help build back what years of austerity cuts have nearly destroyed.
The Chicago Public School District is the third largest school district in the United States educating around 400,000 students. Back in 1987 CPS was named “the worst in the nation”(). Moving its way up to the top, since then, CPS had completely rebuilt its structure, appointing leaders and reformed ideas. Now, with a deficit projected to be around $1 billion CPS is headed back in a downwards path, money being the biggest issue. The United States Federal Government already has financial issues of its own, which makes dealing with a CPS budget a problem within a problem. CPS, with a $6.6 billion FY2013 budget, is now taking a new strategy based upon a flawed “Student-Based Budgeting System”. The Board of Education is also struggling to solve the debt they have reached, and with their FY2014 plans this year’s budget book is argued to be “one of the most poorly written budgets”(). The way CPS is handling their budget is not benefiting the lives and education of students and is leaving CPS at a loss with giant financial issues.
7) Teacher will review performance tasks of unit and explain rubrics for tasks. Teacher will introduce roles they will assume during unit.
As a leader candidate, I can understand the challenges and multiplicity of complications that administrators must face each day. However, I will not accept any remote possibility that the students must be affected by some flaws of the school organization. We all as leaders, must be strategic with people, time, and money to guide our students towards an academic success.
...it, set higher aspirations, have better attendance, come to class more prepared to learn, and have fewer behavior problems” (Robbins and Alvy, 2009, p.178). These achievable improvements should be priority for school districts.
An effective school leader possesses skills to create, implement, evaluate, improve and share a staff development plan. I met with Ben Rhodes, Sandy Creek Middle School’s principal, to interview him on the specific elements of his yearly staff development plan. We began with the design process focusing on the district and school goals. District goals include improving literacy across the content areas in reading and writing, Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum (GVC). Guaranteed and Viable Technology (GVT), and Closing the Achievement Gap (Equity in Excellence). Using a variety of assessments to focus on specific needs, Ben Rhodes and Mary Sonya, our Pupil Achievement Specialist, examined CSAP, Explore, MAP, and RAD data. They use the Colorado Growth Model to help guide them to determine if students have made adequate yearly progress. Together, they created the plan that included the district goals mentioned above as well as continuing to include new technology skills, information on special education changes with Response to Intervention (RTI), maintaining current staff implementation of literacy goals and a new goal of raising achievement in math.
Effective classroom teachers use a variety of assessment instruments on a daily basis to determine student progress. Assessing the students is the easy part and can be ongoing or at specific times during the year. After any assessment is given, it is vital for the teachers to analyze the results of the assessment. Finally, teachers much continually monitor student progress in order to ensure student success. The assessing, analyzing, and monitoring requires planning on the teacher’s part. If teachers fail to plan, they plan to fail; this is the result in many classrooms today because teachers access their students and then do not analyze the data in order to monitor and document students’ learning.
Also to look for competitive pricing and flexible solutions. Therefore the leaders must not be afraid to take risks in order to support the changes needed to accomplish this goal. These solutions are capable of working if the education leaders build these relationships with local businesses. They can also be done when the leaders come together and see that it is capable to increase school funding by seeing the possibilities it holds for the future. It solves the problem by showing the ideas it can do by increasing graduation rates, increase participation of students, updating textbooks and technology, an also stopping voucher usage.
...ides to come together and implement a plan for better practices in assessing the performance of the nation’s teachers and its students.
On Monday,October 14, 2013 at 7:00 P.M., I attended the Bradford Area School District school board meeting at Floyd C. Fretz Middle School in the large group instruction room. This meeting was important for the teachers, students, and the schools in the district. It provided information that correlated to the material in class and a perspective on what situations as a future teacher I may experience.