"The work or lack of ..."

We need to focus on the strategic work of the Annual Planning Table as well as those areas identified as Opportunities for Improvement in the Annual Organizational Assessment (OA).

We need to at all cost of time, energy, and effort implement the strategies, action steps, and targets in place to ensure this work is accomplished.

To that end, I am providing, again, the strategic work emergent from the OA and Comprehensive Needs Assessment (CNA) with explicit timelines for completion.

Much of this work involves planning. Planning takes dedicated, concentrated time. In concert, much of this work is initially individual then collaborative. It should go without saying that this is critical, essential to providing direction, guidance, and leadership for this work to integrate fully into the system.

Without system integration we will not move forward. We have relied too heavily on individual performance or lack of, individual capacity of lack of, skill, knowledge, and experience or lack of.

Now more than ever, it should be clear that without the synergy of all our effort we fail. Moreover, the students and staff fail by our inability to lead – this is not acceptable.

We have labored to bring focus, direction, and “do ability” to educating all students to high standards. Our shortcomings to date have been almost entirely reflective of our leadership in the area of implementation or lack of.

Without implementation, deep implementation our plan, practices, and programs have yielded inconsistent results. Although inconsistent, we have achieved more than previously thought possible. Imagine, if you can, where we could be, would be, or should be with deep implementation.

Therefore, the time has come, the time is now to exercise leadership – effective leadership to ensure our plan is implemented deeply, effective practice is implemented deeply, and results producing programs are deeply implemented.

Implementation requires unprecedented monitoring. It requires focus, intentionality, and above else sacrifice – the sacrifice of self, ego, pride, credit, and role.

Our roles, titles, and status mean little if the system does not improve. Do we understand this individually as well as corporately?

The days of internal comparisons are over. It does not matter if one or more schools out perform other schools in our school system. The metric for comparison has moved far beyond our system.

Our performance is no longer measured locally. Our students are measured against other systems similar or dissimilar across the state. This is as it should be. For, our students will compete against their peers across the state for college entrance, scholarships, military service, and employment.

In fact, our students are competing presently not only across North Carolina but the nation. In some cases they are competing internationally.

Therefore, the adult performance is no longer being judged at the local level. Our performance, yours and mine are being assessed by results not intentions. If our effect as measured by student performance does not improve to ensure our students do, in fact, compete we will be replaced – not the students, the adults!

Implementation is not as complex as some make it to be. The sooner we accept that implementation is all about the choices we make the sooner we will embrace accountability for our performance.

I was reminded the other day that before we put the Algebra initiative in at Anson Middle School, the highest percent of 8^th graders exiting having passed the high school End of Course exam was 11%. Do you know that last year over 50% of the 8^th graders exited with high school Algebra credit?

This is but one example of improvement – but one example of “do ability”.

I am far from satisfied with 50%. However, we must stay the course. It is not unreasonable to achieve 75-80% success in Algebra this year at AMS. Fundamentally, it will come down to the choices that we the adults make.