Goals for this term

I have thought long and hard about what my goals for this term would be. Teaching thus far has proven to be extremely challenging. In fact, I would not even classify what I do every day as "teaching". I feel that at the current school I am at, the job title of "Glorified Babysitter" would be a better fit. Which is fine, I completely understand that everyone needs to start somewhere. However, my goals will probably be extremely different than another teacher's goals at a different school. 

My academic goals for students are as follows- just complete work. If every person in my class just completed their in-class assignments, I think I would throw them a big party! Right now, I only have about 30% of students even attempting to do work in my class, The other 70% refuse to even pick up a pencil, and instead they choose to mess around the whole period, which is where all the behavior problems come into play. Furthermore, I am outraged at how the whole public school system is crippling my students. I have learned that no matter what my students do in class, they will ALL be continuing on to 9th grade next year. I have a few students getting less than 10% in my class and they know that they will be advancing next year, so they figure, "Why bother doing work in here?" This all is due to the fact that because they area  Title 1 school, they get different privileges than other schools do. So, these kids can barely use correct punctuation when writing narratives or stories, let along correct grammar, spelling, and complete sentences. Most of their writing pieces look like fragmented test messages. It is disturbing and I used to try and grade these papers. Now, I just look to see that they are done and they get full credit. And, like I stated earlier, I get about 30% of my students actually handing in completed assignments.

Another goal I have is to get a better system going of classroom management. I can not get my class to be quiet for more than 1 minute. Literally, 60 seconds- before someone starts talking again.