School Accountability Report Card Template: Fill & Download for Free

“You can come early, you can leave late, you can take work home with you, but don’t try to do all three.” That’s the advice I was given early in my teaching career, and I found myself violating this rule several times a year. This is a sample:Preparing lessonsChanging lessons you just delivered in the hopes they will be more effective next time.Documenting, not just a percentage grade, but whether a student meets, exceeds, approaches, or is well below a few dozen learning standards or objectives.Differentiating lessons for different levels of readiness. For example, some of your 7th graders read on the same level as typical third graders, others read like high school or college students. Your lessons need to be meaningful for all of your students and encourage all students to grow. Good luck.Trying out various technologies, especially the free or inexpensive ones (or the ones your administrator bought in a panic at the end of a fiscal year, or the tech bought with a grant that somebody off campus decided your school needed) trying to find tech that will do what you need it to do and/or make your job easier. For example, designing a database to help you document mastery of learning objectives and print reports for parents. But it will only work on your home computer, so you have to export it as a pdf, email it to yourself, and print it at school.Trying to improve a child’s classroom behavior by communicating with parents who think their parental duty is to argue with you.Communicating with parents who do not want their bright child to be challenged, they just want their child to get A’s.Reviewing, discussing, changing, adding, removing, trying to implement, or documenting that you have implemented special measures for disabled students.Creating a template for students who are not doing well to create a plan to improve their grade, checking to see which students have finished writing their plans, which parental signatures you still need, then preparing grades for those students, so they can discuss with their parents whether their goals were realistic, and whether they took the steps required to bring up their grade.Meetings, endless meetings. Especially meetings where someone who used to be a teacher tells you that you should be doing the things that you would be doing, if you weren’t stuck in a meeting.Cleaning sunflower seed hulls out of desks.Partially filling out disciplinary forms with the names of the usual suspects and their usual disruptive behavior and photocopying the forms, so you can more quickly get back to teaching when the behaviors occur.Filling out forms to request necessary classroom equipment be repaired and unnecessary classroom equipment be removed, knowing full well that you’ll probably lose that battle.Throwing out 25 years of material that the last three or four teachers who had the classroom before you hoarded.Explaining how every expenditure of your classroom supply budget will directly impact student achievement, or giving up and ordering it from a non-approved vendor on your own credit card because it’s easier.Planning field trips. Counting field trip money, accounting for it, rolling the coins, noting the names and amounts of students who need change, contacting a bus company to reserve three buses, calling them back to cancel one of them. Taking ten late permission slips and explaining to the child who brings the 11th that there are no more seats on the bus.

Has the American male been emasculated? American men once had the reputation of being strong, decisive, and aggressive. Has this reputation diminished in the age of corporate culture and political correctness?Ah, this talk about how the masculine in America has been emasculated. We seem to hear about this sort of thing every time anything about a man’s role changes in any way, which is all the time.A lot of the norms and standards around gender roles in America are changing, and not everyone is dealing well with that. Not all men are really well-equipped to even talk about it, or to cope with these kinds of change. With that said, to call what’s happening ‘emasculation’ is more dramatic than it is helpful or descriptive.It suggests a paradoxical concept of masculinity, in which men are called to be their true gangster selves, against the triggered-snowflake modern trope in which “beta” males must struggle with notions of whether or not being male-gangsters can be squared with the idea of justice at all.modern men: Do we even want to participate in life as brutes, as gangsters? Monsters?troglodytes: If you don’t, you’re not a man.modern men: But real men aren’t abusers, those creeps don’t deserve protection.trog: Sissy.…etc. Clearly, the above dynamic is about triggering the insecure into denying their insecurity, to hide their shame at not being ‘alphas’. It’s a pecking-order ritual as old as shame itself.It comes down to an argument about what it means to be a man, which might just be the least-had, most-needed conversation on offer with regard to that question. In the past, it was assumed that we just knew what to do, by modeling the men in our lives. Unfortunately, this laissez-faire approach to male identity threw young boys into a marketplace dominated by gangsters, terrorists, abusers- in which it wasn’t safe to speak out, or to buck the system. This is what it has always meant to be an american male- be a bully, be a victim, or get out of the way.(And that’s just the template for relationships with other men. The adjacent set of relationships, those men have with women, are organized through a series of self-serving double-standards, and of course, more violence.)Hierarchy as a standard doesn’t happen naturally; it requires substantial violence to enforce- and still more to convince its victims to deny it is happening. [1]The question asserts aggressiveness and decisiveness to be descriptive of maleness, but these are not qualities unique to it, nor are they the exclusive domain of the American male. Too often, presenting the outward appearance of aggression and decisiveness are the hallmarks of the insecure male, one with ‘something to prove’. These are the ones that get a lot of attention, but they are not the only kind of man we have in America.Let’s posit that strong, decisive, and aggressive are not qualities that uniquely define maleness, nor are they limited to men alone. This talk about how ‘men were once men’ is as old as male insecurity. Men have hearkened back to a time when men could be men for as long as men have faced challenges to anything remotely connected to our identities as men.This does not mean that American men don’t have real challenges, or that they aren’t existentially terrifying or painful to deal with. We’ve grown up in a context dominated by violence (covert, and overt) and unspoken rules and norms most of us have either internalized or never consciously examined. As these norms and expectations become revealed for the ugliness they hold, it’s painful to acknowledge our roles in maintaining systematic unfairness, violence, and cruelty.Men: you aren’t diminished, or any less male, just because times are changing. It just means the way you navigate the world as a man is going to be different than it was for your grandfather.Being an American male has always involved challenges, but the fact that there ever were days in which a man could simply assert his masculinity via aggression or violence and have it be “oh, he’s just being male” just means that being held accountable for violence against women were not among those challenges.Men received some outrageous benefit-of-the-doubt in our grandparents’ day (and well before then, for that matter); it is an entrenched culture of abuse that persists even today. The only thing new is that we’re telling the truth about it now, and people who don’t want that truth to be told are pushing back.Most women have been sexually abused. [2] [3] . Most report workplace discrimination and on average are paid less than their male peers. The women in your life are sitting on deep wells of rage, which should be alarming. That these issues are being talked about at last threatens the order keeping these things so.There’s nothing like suppressed wages for women to lower their standards in men, right?For context, American men are more than just bullies and predators. If we look back to the early parts of the last century, they have shared real challenges like famine and poverty when the economy collapsed in the 1930s. In the world wars, if they didn’t enlist or participate in the war efforts, their manhood was considered laughable; out of reach. Men literally died trying to live up to their male identities in those times.In the post-war years, men (or at least, white ones) had it good- a heroes’ return from the war, easy financing to buy homes and go to college, first in line to get good jobs, little or no workplace competition from women, lots of women in need of a husband and provider… and meanwhile, the country was a place that radically mistreated women and people of color, while whitewashing it all as somehow benign.This normalization of ‘feminine’ roles in relation to male ones is at best creepy, given that women were not protected by law from husbands, could not have credit in their own names, and could not find gainful employment in workplaces that were ‘for men’. Depression and drug abuse became ways to compensate for the pressure to live this way and yet appear perfect and happy. [4]The pressure to live up to the stereotype (and the un-mentioned violence women were shamed into hiding) led to very real problems that would be revealed when we saw female suicide rates drop by 25% in states that granted no-fault divorce laws. [5]Many of the advantages that accrued to men came in the form of violence and keeping women powerless or dependent.Having these advantages (without having to talk about them) raised the bar for White American men, and the prospect of questioning their validity threatens to put the old measures (ability to buy a house and support a family with a high-school education, for example) of masculinity out of reach for most. That’s why American men react with such terror when the basis of their advantages is brought up. How vulnerable are those man-cards, guys?As globalization and automation (and advances by women and people of color) have encroached on traditionally male and white roles and spaces, a lot of American men are feeling stressed, triggered as they fail to live up to the standards set by their fathers and grandparents. And there’s nobody more willing to overreact than an insecure man.The cruelest irony on offer today, in the context of the #MeToo and #HimToo narratives (in which women report their abuse, and men report being falsely accused), is that men are being told that in order to protect the innocent from unfair accusations, we must defend all men (including the guilty) indiscriminately.That this is cynical and absurd should go without saying. It’s not about defending the innocent, it is about entrenching the culture that provides specific men (particuarly, those surrounded by people willing to close ranks and protect them) with impunity. It is the last stand of the upright brigade, the influential people who defend theirs even when theirs are rotten creeps.It’s very true that change is uncomfortable, especially when that change relates to your identity. As a man, I hate discovering the way I’ve internalized unfair gender roles and acted like that stuff was reasonable (even though it’s been ‘normal’ my whole life). But, as a man, I’m gonna do the things I have to in order to bust up the old patriarchy. That shit has got to stop running the show.Footnotes[1] The Gender Hierarchy Requires Incredible Violence to Uphold It[2] A New Survey Finds 81 Percent Of Women Have Experienced Sexual Harassment[3] Measuring #MeToo: more than 80 percent of women have been sexually harassed or assaulted[4] This Is The Drug In The Rolling Stones' Song "Mother's Little Helper"[5] Stanford Business School Study Finds No-Fault Divorce Laws May Have Increased Women's Physical Well-Being

Here’s a list of tools we use at our startup to be more productive. Some are free, others gain us time and money in respect of the costs they bring.Team Communication and CoordinationSlackThere’s no going around Slack these days. It has become one of my best friends since I joined Salesflare. Not because I don’t have a social life anymore (which is also not untrue) but because it’s just kind of ‘there’ all the time. I actually have troubles imagining how teams coordinated team communication in the pre-Slack era. If used to its full power, Slack acts like a central hub where everything comes together. You can set up an army of bots to keep you notified of everything happening throughout your startup, or to just keep fun levels high with the occasional meme and GIF. It’s an ever-changing blackboard filled with output of your team’s efforts, from every possible corner of your endeavours.Project and Task ManagementTrelloGreat tool to keep your team right on top of the work. Everything we did, are doing and are planning on doing over at our startup is on Trello. Every meeting starts with looking at the Trello board and ends with putting down ideas in actionable tasks on that board. Simple and minimalist interface, yet highly configurable. Double the fun with the Slack plugin.If you’re looking to get on with something else following Trello’s recent acquisition by Atlassian, check out UpWave — a slick alternative that was recently launched on ProductHunt.SEOAnswer The PublicEverybody’s searching for something, right? Finding the right keywords to grow your organic search words starts with knowing what questions your target audience is looking answers to. Answer The Public will give you beautiful visual insights in the questions most frequently asked about your topic.AhrefsAhrefs is about the best thing around for organic traffic research and SEO. It can show you backlinks (including its URL and domain rating as well as other cool data) of every website out there, which makes it great to dig into the SEO strategy of your competitors. There’s also a keyword explorer, which can be of great help to determine the keywords you should be targeting. You can use it day-to-day to keep track of how you rank in search engines, in different locations, for different keywords etc. I’ve written a more in-depth guide on how to effectively use Ahrefs for keyword research here on Quora.Tools like Moz.com and SEMrush offer similar functionalities and are also reportedly great.User engagement, testing and trackingIntercom.ioTalk to your website’s visitors in real-time. Intercom’s in-prompt personal messaging allows you to activate leads in the early stages of the sales cycle and is a great way to provide support for customers. Moreover, it’s great for tracking frequency of use and behaviour inside your app. Hands-on, low-threshold solution to get and stay on top of your users, whether they’re still in your sales funnel or already locked in.KissmetricsIn comparison with Google Analytics, Kissmetrics provides more user-centred analytics that are probably more powerful. The difference lies within the way they track people as they visit your website. Whereas Google Analytics will assume each visit is from a new person, Kissmetrics will assume each visit from a particular device is from the same person. In case of a sign-in option, Kissmetrics will also learn about the various devices a particular user is using and assign sessions from those devices to the same ID. This makes Kissmetrics more effective in filtering out potential leads from your website into your sales funnel. Here’s a full break-down of the differences from the Kissmetrics blog in case you want to dig deeper.CrazyEggGoogle Analytics and Kissmetrics will tell you which pages your users visit and how much time they spend on your website. What they won’t tell you is what those visitors are actually doing on those pages. CrazyEgg is a lightweight but powerful heat-mapping tool that can fill in those gaps. It will tell you exactly where users have clicked, scrolled and which parts of the pages they’ve spent the most time on. You can segment clicks on your website by variables such as referrer and search keyword and visualise the results on what is called a confetti map. Crazy Egg is far from the most powerful heat-mapping tool around but does stand out for simplicity and affordability. It does one thing and it does it well.UXProbeUXProbe is a remote user testing tool that allows you to have users test your website or app without you or them having to physically move. You can set and customise the different tasks you want the user to carry out. Both the user’s activities on-screen and his expression in front of it are recorded to give you the most accurate idea of how they experience your website. This frees you of having to go through all the trouble of inviting people, setting up the session and providing all the gear. After the session, the app provides you with insightful metrics, giving you a full-fledged idea of how your website ranks in terms of user experience so you know where and what to improve.Prospecting and Lead GenerationHunter.ioHunter will help you find out e-mail addresses based on company and domain — which you can thus easily get from the magical Sales Navigator + Dux-Soup combo. Just bulk upload email addresses in a .CSV and Hunter will tell you which ones are ‘deliverable’. Hunter is not perfect though, we’ve had confirmed email addresses that turned out bad anyway.ElucifyIf guessing and Hunter don’t cut it, try Elucify. It’s a crowdsourced and free database for business contact information. Just enter what company you want email addresses from and see what it has in store for you. Not airtight, but it’s really free so no reason to complain.Email outreachMailChimpMailChimp is the go-to tool for managing newsletter-ey email campaigns. It allows for effective email campaigns that won’t end up in your recipient’s spam box. Other than that: low learning curve, powerful analytics, email tracking, great resources on email templates and easy to integrate with other tools. Just wonderfully easy to use.MixmaxMixmax is the tool to turbocharge your Gmail. We use it for cold emailing because it sends emails directly from your Gmail, unlike MailChimp and alternatives. This makes it perfect for cold emailing, as it will prevent your email from ending up in the ‘Promotions’ section of your lead’s Gmail account. Furthermore Mixmax gives you a lot more power in setting up your email sequences; it allows you for example to break off a sequence when a recipient responds to your first email. Mixmax is filled with a bunch of cool features to spice up your email game: slash commands, email templates, email and click tracking, embedded surveys/polls and an awesome meeting scheduler.-CRM / Sales Funnel ManagementSalesflareOur very own intelligent sales CRM. Salesflare is built to automate most of your sales funnel. It automatically fills out your address book with data it pulls from sources like social media, email signatures and company databases. It tracks and logs all interactions of leads towards you (phone, email, calendar), including email and website tracking. All that is handed to you in an automated timeline so you have everything you need at your fingertips at every stage of the sales cycle. There’s more: from the data it gathers, it will tell and remind you what to do about specific leads so no deal can fall through the cracks anymore. Basically all you have to do is write emails, do meetings and have coffee. It’s not a robot yet, but it does do most of the working and thinking for you. There’s a desktop and a mobile app, but we mostly use it straight from our Gmail, where it gives us everything we need on a customer from an integrated sidebar. Besides Gmail, it’s perfectly integrated with our Google apps and other productivity apps like Slack, Stripe, MailChimp and Trello.Management of online payments and subscriptionsStripeStripe is the friend that takes care of your online payments. No effort required from your side whatsoever. Very easy to work with and great in handling different subscription plans. Highly flexible in its integrations and a friendly API. Hook it up to Salesflare to automatically mark an opportunity as ‘won’ when the customer starts paying in Stripe. Then have it tell in real-time you when your money is flowing in by linking it to Slack. Awesome, right? You’re gonna need Zapier for this though, read on.Password ManagementLastPassWith the gazillion tools and accounts you and your team are using, you’ll have a lot of passwords laying around. LastPass allows you to have everything safely stored and easily accessible at all times so you don’t have to waste time anymore getting headaches trying to remember that one password of that one website.Video hosting and analyticsWistiaWistia is a video hosting service that will give you insightful analytics and heat maps on the views and viewers of your videos. You can completely customise the video player to fit your brand and control the pre — and post-roll behaviour of the video. It has an API so you can make adaptations to videos, accounts and statistics in the back-end. Perfect for tutorials, how-to videos and a lot more.GraphicsCanvaCanva is the place where you make magic with the stuff you found on free stock photo directories and Flaticon. It’s probably the most user-friendly graphic design tool you’ll ever come across, and it’s free. Canva gives you the power to create practically anything — social media graphics, banners, invitations, infographics, flyers, business cards — by just dragging and dropping. It’s filled with great resources and templates you can easily combine with your own images. The paid version, Canva for Work, packs all this power plus the possibilities to create brand kits with consistent fonts and colours, customise templates and set up shared folders. The Canva Design School is a great online virtual community stacked with tutorials, inspiration, tools and templates. Your graphics will have never looked better.Workflow AutomationZapierIf you don’t know about Zapier yet, you’re missing out. It’s pretty much the holy grail of all SaaS tools for the quite simple reason it can make them all work together. You can just pick out your favourite tool for every job of your sales cycle and tell Zapier to streamline them into an effective app flow that is perfectly aligned to your startup. For us, Zapier is like an engine in which every single app of our toolset works together. Workflow automation done right.