EDLD+5370+Reflections+on+assignments+in+EDLD+5333

**Reflections on assignments in EDLD 5333 Leadership for Accountability as shown in the Course-Embedded Assignment document in the Resource section of the course.**
In my first year working in the school I performed duties as teacher and mainly took care of maintaining a good quality in the instruction, assessments and compliance with the directives from the administration. I also planned my lessons and in a weekly basis and meet with my grade level team. Certainly, some times I thaught that administrators supervise the teachers and we only make the hard work while administrators were in a comfortable position, whose main activity consist in just issue directives that others must to complete, specially dealing with students and be accountable of the students’ academic achievement (Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain, 2005).

Leadership for accountability allowed me the opportunity to know more about the role of the administrators and how important is their duties in making sure that the school complies with state and federal requirements. Administrators are the mainly accountable figure for the students’ academic performance and to achieve the district and campus goals.

During this course I conducted the evaluation of my campus and researched about the school testing system. I found that our school has some weaknesses and I recognized the strengths that we have built thoughout the years. I found than the school has been rated as academically unacceptable (AU) twice during the eleven years of existence; in my role as leader, it allowed me to reflect in the importance of closing the academic gap that was created during non-scored grades, specially first and second grade and the need of increase the academic rigor in early childhood.

As learner of this important matter, I found that the administrator need to have enough information to make the better decisions to create a clear school vision with Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic/Results-oriented/Research-based, and Time-bound (Learning Point Associates, Inc., 2004) goals. It understood the importance of align all the stakeholders this vision in order to achieve that goals. I learned how NCLB outlines the process that the state of Texas follows to develop the system that measure the progress of students. This process includes: setting challenging academic standards, developing annual state-level assessments that address the states’ learning standards, setting an initial starting point, specifying successive targets for AYP, and providing increased support to schools that consistently do not meet AYP (Haycock & Wiener, 2003).

I also developed some skills to manage information, understand the Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) report and to extract important information that help to delineate the picture of how the school is performing and important statistics about demographics. I helped me to study for my Lamar Competency Exam (LCE) and to take better decisions in my duties as administrator.

References:

====Haycock, K., & Weiner, R. (2003, April). Adequate yearly progress under NCLB. Paper prepared for the National Center on Education and the Economy Policy Forum. Washington, DC: The Education Trust. Retrieved from http://www2.edtrust.org/NR/rdonlyres/F7F160C3-DE70-4F63-BF0C-2DC47911DA66/0/AYPUnderNCLB.pdf====

Learning Point Associates, Inc., (2004). Improving Adequate Yearly Progress for English Language Learners. Retrieved from http://www.learningpt.org/pdfs/literacy/aypell.pdf.

Rivkin, S., Hanushek, E. & Kain, J. (2005). Teachers, Schools, And Academic Achievement. Econometrica, Vol. 73, No. 2 (March, 2005), 417–458