Friday, September 7, 2012

CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 2

Well, I got a new job since my last post so some of these next assignments will be a little more challenging.  I used to know pretty much everything about my former school in the technology department after teaching there for 10 years and now I am transitioning into an entirely different school and environment.  Exciting for sure, but it'll make these last 2 classes of this degree program interesting.  Well, enough about that since I'm playing catch up here...

I'm still struggling through the Data Retreat paper because I was going to write it from the point of view of my old school, but it is a Catholic School and therefore difficult to get a hold of test scores or any other meaningful data.  So then I started  to write it from the perspective of my new position since it is a WI public school and their data is available on the WINSS website.  I was running into problems when it came to some of the deeper questions, though, because I am not familiar with procedures and processes yet.  I may end up writing it using both situations but we'll see.

In answering the forum questions I used the test data from WINSS for my new school, Bayside Middle School.  I chose to use the disparity in scores among the different ethnicity groups as a point of discussion.  The "White Not Hispanic" ethnic group were the most successful group when looking at the test scores and I tagged that as an area that my school needs to improve.  Some suggestions that I provided were:

1. Evaluate the curriculum. Look for any content or methods that might have a slantedness towards one ethnicity or another.
2. Evaluate the staff. Look to see that they are truly identifying with each child and being aware of background or cultural differences.
3. Evaluate the tests. Do they have a history of being skewed or providing biased results.
4. Research the students' backgrounds whose test scores are suffering. Try to identify a common thread that might provide insight and use this information to find innovative ways to reach these students.

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