The STEM Academy (SWAS)

Introduction

The case school is the Northeast STEM Academy. The STEM Academy is part of the Northeast Independent School District (NEISD) in San Antonio Texas. The STEM Academy is a magnet program serving grades 6 to 12 (“STEM,” 2008). It is the only magnet program that spans both middle and high school. The school operates as a school-within-a-school (SWAS). Though the STEM Academy is a separate and autonomous program, it is housed on two campuses. The middle school (grades 6-7) is housed at Nimitz Middle School and the high school (grades 8-12) is at Robert E. Lee High School.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) uses standards-based education reform with measurable goals to improve individual student outcomes in education.

ethnicity, socioeconomic, special programs – SpEd, ELL.

- Leaders are held responsible for the results and often given some discretion how to resolve the campus issues or how to enhance/enrich the program; promotes leader buy-in and ownership of the problem Weaknesses of accountability to school organization leadership:

- Some leaders take the pressure and pass it on negatively to the staff/students; a little pressure can be good but the leader must know when to push, when to encourage and so on in order to keep morale high and the goal attainable

- Some leaders don’t know what to do with the data and are not confident enough to ask for help or guidance; thus, they either retreat or they “get out the whip” yet either way there is no direction or team work with the faculty; this is to the detriment of the faculty and students

- The accountability system is now so complicated that the typical parent or taxpayer can’t understand it and all the nuances; this can cause a misperception of a school’s performance based on one sub-population that may not have done well because of a few

Benefits are 1) It causes leaders to collaborate amongst schools and districts resulting in promoting new teaching strategies and ideas to improve education for students. 2) It helps the leader gauge learning by the establishment of minimum teaching standards for all students at each grade level and 3) It gives the leader a method to identify non effective teaching practices and/or teachers.

The cons on the leadership is 1) It forces the leader to condense content and teacher must cut and/or condense because of lack of classroom time, 2) It doesn 't give the leadership flexibility in consideration for learning disabled in testing scores 3) Because of the inflexibility and the condensation of the curriculum it leads to a loss of creativity and little depth of understanding in the