The concept of strategic planning is usually associated only with profit organizations, yet, it is extremely important for educational institutions, in particular schools. It is hardly possible to achieve the goals, which these agencies set without identifying long-and short term policies. According to John Bryson, the process of planning involves ten steps (Bryson, 32). There is no need to enumerate all of them in this report, yet their essence comes down to identifying major participants, creating a vision, analysis of internal and external factors, and implementation program. The main purpose of this report is to analyze the data, provided by Texas Education Agency, namely, AEIS reports for the school Felix Cook Jr. Elementary and propose certain ways to address the problems, which this school may have.
Judging from the AEIS report for 2006-2007, we may say that the most stressing issue in this educational institution is the number of at-risk students, approximately sixty percent. Certainly, it is mostly caused by external factors but they may have most detrimental effects on academic performance and overall development of the child. It should be pointed out that this number increased in 2008, which indicates that this problem has only aggravated. Ninety-five percent of students are economically disadvantaged; consequently, we may speak about low educational expectations. Probably, it is necessary to launch in-school programs in order to shield students from harmful outside influence. Additionally such programs may enable to establish health relations between the faculty and students. Nonetheless, the school administration has not taken any measures to alleviate the tension. Jim Knight believes that it is of crucial importance to ensure that the objectives of the organization (school) and customer (students and parents) coincide (Jim Knight, 51). It appears that such agreement has not been reached.
Certainly, the most difficult problem that schools have often struggled to resolve is funding. In order to substantiate this statement, we may draw some statistical examples, according to AEIS report in 2007, each student received only 2, 29 $ for instructional-related services, although, in the following year, the funding was increased, we may say that it is not sufficient. However, it is impermissible to shift the blame only on the problems with funding because in the vast majority of cases, the success depends on the structure of the organization or probably, on the relationships between various participants.
As regards the academic performance, it is worth mentioning that this school did not achieve very good results in mathematics and reading. Certainly, it may be ascribed to a great number of factors; however, it seems that one of the underlying causes is that student’s low engagement in the process of education. For instance, according to this report only nineteen percent of the students are enrolled to any program (only 140 out of 716). It can be explained by the inability of school administration to arouse interests in students, yet one may also say that it is due to some external problems, namely economic ones.
Therefore, we can arrive at the conclusion that the functioning of an educational institution is strongly influenced by the following external and internal factors: funding, educational expectations, and interactions between academic staff, students, and parents. In this particular case, we may speak about low academic expectations, and low engagement of the students.
Bibliography
John Moore Bryson. “Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide to Strengthening and Sustaining Organizational Achievement” John Wiley and Sons, 2004.
Jim Knight. “Strategic Planning for School Managers: A Handbook of Approaches to Strategic Planning and Development for Schools and Colleges” Routledge, 1997.
Richard DuFour, Robert E. Eaker. “Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement”. ASCD, 1998.