End of Year Reflection

As the end of the year approaches it gets you thinking about how your students did this year. I was listening to NPR this morning (as I do every morning and I highly recommend doing so) and they were talking about all these education issues coming up such as holding teachers for accountable for student success. This got me thinking about how my students have grown and how I would be judged professionally. As I look at my students and where they started at with reading in math everyone made substantial growth. Then it made me think well what is substantial growth. What is expected growth for a student who came in a year behind. I can't even imagine how third grade teachers do it with some students coming to them at a 1st grade reading level. So my question to all of you is how do we reflect on student growth in a data driven way in this new philosophy of teachers being solely responsible for student academic success? Do we look at growth? Is there an expectation to get all students at grade level even when several start a year behind? And if we do reflect on ourselves professionally....what is appropriate growth for a student starting so far behind?