Emily Driver

Fall 2016
Student Teaching
School Improvement Plans
Part 1
School improvement plans are created in order to improve student performance within
schools. School principals are responsible for creating an impartial committee, composed of the
principal themselves, assistant principals or their representatives, teachers, instructional support
staff, teacher assistants, and parents of children attending the school. These representatives are to
be voted onto the committee by a secret ballot of their peers (parents are elected by other parents,
teachers elected by other teachers, etc). In addition, the composition of parents on the committee
is to accurately represent the ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic makeup of the school body as a
whole. The committee will review data from previous years to determine trends, as well as what
did and did not work for students at the school, and create attainable goals that can help to
improve the performance of the school.
These plans are to be written every year, and can be in effect for no more than two years
before being revised. However, they can be amended at any time, and often are to accommodate
for changes in legislation. The law also stipulates that if, at any time, the local board of education
sees that a plan is not working, is unlawful due to a legal change, or is impeding student
performance, the board has the right to revoke the relevant portions of the plan and have the
committee revise those portions.

As a teacher, I think my most obvious role in this process would be serving on the
committee that helps to create and revise the school improvement plans. However, I also feel, as
the committee relies on data to make their decisions, that it is my responsibility to provide
appropriate and accurate data. I also believe that it would be beneficial on my part to examine
my own instructional practices on a regular basis, so that I am able to inform the committee as to
which instructional practices are most helpful to my students. As far as implementation, I believe
it is important for me to read the school improvement plan carefully, and abide by the decisions
the committee has made.

Part 2
Overall, my school performs much better than the district average, even if you only look
at the EOG scores as compared to the other middle school in the county. In fact, only 24% of
students performed, on average, below grade-level on their EOGs. The reasoning for this may be,
having reviewed EOG data for the students in my current grade for another project, that many
students are more than proficient in one area, but behind in another area. For example, many
students who have a 5 in Language Arts have a 2 in Mathematics, or vice versa. The exception to
this is our Academically/Intellectually Gifted students, who typically perform very well across
the board. This is logical, as their AIG status is dependent on their test scores, and if they scored
lower than that, they would likely be no longer considered AIG.
When broken down into subcategories, things get a little hairier. Females (78.7%
proficiency) perform about 5% better than males (73% proficiency), but both groups are well
above the district averages (67.4% and 61.3%, respectively). When breaking students down by

ethnicity, white students have a proficiency of 77.5%, hispanic students have a proficiency of
50%, and multiracial students have a proficiency of 28.6%. These last two may seem strange, but
in actuality, these numbers are mostly because there are so few hispanic or multiracial students at
the school. The student body is primarily white. The only biracial student I know of in my grade
received a 5 in reading, but a 1 in math on his 6th grade EOGs. Ive only met one hispanic
student, and he transferred in this year, so his scores are not included in the school report card.
Therefore, I feel these statistics are liable to be skewed, based solely on the fact that there are so
few students within those categories. A large percentage of my students are economically
disadvantaged, because we live in a very rural and impoverished county. Nevertheless, my ED
students have an average proficiency of 67.8%. Student with disabilities scored 33.3%, so only a
third of them passed. On all counts, my school scored higher than other schools, on both a
district and a state level.
When looking specifically at my subject area, English, I can see that we did better than
the district and state, but that our English average (73%) is a little lower than our entire school
average. Math is a little lower, at 72% proficiency. Being confused about how this could
contribute to the overall school average of 76%, I chose to look at scores for the science EOG,
and the school average was 93%!
I feel that, given these results, we are not doing badly. I would suggest some form of
remedial work for students with disabilities, and a review of their testing accommodations to
ensure that they are able to perform to the best of their abilities. I am pleased to report that our
school has started doing FUSION reading with students who have IEPs or 504 plans, and so far,
this has seemed to help a bit, though we are still only three weeks into the semester. I also find it

encouraging that, over the past year, student proficiency has grown from an average of 65.7% to
76.1%. I feel this bodes well for our school, and I am interested to see how the implementation
of the FUSION program, as well as the ongoing efforts of teachers to assist their students to the
best of their abilities, will continue that growth.