Teachers, administrators, students, and parents all should be partially accountable for a student’s education. The question of how is not that simple, but can be done.
California Education Code and State Laws legally do hold students accountable, but when teachers dare to follow through with what the laws proscribe, too often they are blamed for a student’s misbehavior.
Of course some parents who love their children have little control over their behavior. Why should teachers be expected to do what the parents cannot when the teacher has little legal control over parents? I used to tell these parents that if they allowed me to do whatever I thought was best for their child – without their interference – I believed I could make a difference. I usually did, but I am a psychologist as well as public school teacher. This is not a choice most teachers could offer.
If the teacher is providing a strong program, even helping those with “special needs," then when a child breaks the law, the consequences should be clear and supported by the parents and the district. In California the law is very clear that a teacher can suspend a child from her room for one and one-half days on her say so.
As Head Teacher in every school I taught I found that many teachers would send a child to me over trivial offenses such as gum chewing and talking in class. The reason they were sent was that this offense was usually the tip of the iceberg and the child had done many more things wrong. Unfortunately, most of the teachers had never bothered to document the many other things, even those such as being openly defiant, hitting others, or refusing to follow reasonable directions.
It is why I constantly explain to student teachers the importance of keeping up-to-date records of everything a child does that breaks the law. If they did, then administrators would be better armed to follow through with appropriate consequences. And, if they didn’t, well that part of accountability would rest with the administrators.
Book publishers, new and diverse technology, and in-service training provide all educators with more options and techniques so every teacher has available the means to reach more students more efficiently and completely than ever. Therefore, if teachers were allowed to use the resources they believed were best for each student or class, then they would have fewer discipline problems and then they should be expected to be accountable for results. As it stands teachers are mandated what to teach, how to teach, and even when to teach things that greatly limit their ability to meet the students’ needs as well as the federal, state, and district expectations.
Imagine you are a carpenter and assigned a job to build a room, but you couldn’t use a hammer, a saw, or a tape measure. Everyone would agree that you couldn’t be held accountable since you weren’t allowed to use the tools best suited for the job. Yet, teachers are exactly in the same situation.
As a Supervising Teacher I’ve met the best-trained teachers that I’ve ever seen. I was not impressed with my training at UCLA in 1958 and believed most teacher education was a joke. Not so these days and though it is still too idealistic (or unrealistic), the teachers are trained much better. And, their supervision usually is helpful and fair. Yet, many teachers who resign complain that they were not given proper support in dealing with disruptive and hostile students, parents, and administrators.
Despite NCLB mandates, the reality is students are not born equal and no matter the teacher’s expertise some students will do better than others. Teacher accountability should be based on factors proven to predict school success or failure – and those that they realistically can control. Factors such as parental support, poverty, English competency, emotional, mental, or physical illness or disabilities, and family crises are some things a teacher has minimal control over, yet they determine how a student behaves and the rate and how much he can or is willing to learn.
Instead of trying to make all students equal they can be tested in all the skill (content in middle and high school) areas in the beginning of each year to use as a baseline to compare him - with him! Each student can have an electronic portfolio that follows him anywhere.
Each teacher can then be judged by the improvement of each child. A rating scale can be made so that the expectations, the per cent improvement for each child can be modified by the above factors that are not controllable by the teacher. Each factor can have a weighted score that will not be completely accurate, but that gives a reasonable assessment and realistic approach to what each student is capable of achieving.
Some different measures of each student’s academic ability and actual learning potential are one factor to be assessed. I agreed in 1965 that black students shouldn’t be assessed with the IQ tests then available, because too often they seemed to show the student was incapable of learning. The student, parents, and teachers didn’t expect much from him and many gave up on education. The negative effects of this prejudice are well documented.
Instead I used Raven’s Matrices to test my black Special Education students and found that most had been misdiagnosed. I refused to follow the requirements for special education classes and managed to get most back into regular classes as I taught them to read, write, and compute. I used this test for years in many different schools to prove to students that they had a far greater potential than they had been made to believe. This test or others would give teachers a baseline of expectations. It would mean a student would begin at levels where he would be successful. It should not mean that he had to remain there, but only where he would start. Working with his teacher, parents, and peers, he could improve at a rate that allowed him more time to get extra or different kinds of help without making him, his parents, or teachers feel like he or they were failures.
I placed students in groups and had individual expectations of each through thorough pre-testing, but they and their parents knew that I understood that I could make errors in testing and more importantly, since I let them challenge any placement, they knew their effort and success would mean they would move up and my expectations would be higher.
A scale of the level of poverty would be another important factor because research has shown there is a positive correlation between economic levels and school success. This is a factor, but when properly assessed and teachers trained to understand how to approach these children, this would be a less important factor.
Their ability to speak the type of English in the texts is another factor that correlates with school success. This also is a factor that as the student is taught English becomes increasingly less of a factor.
This type of scale on each factor (there are others that probably should be included) is possible with present technology and is a fair way to hold teachers accountable. An ongoing portfolio will give each student, teacher, parent, and supervisor accurate information about exactly where he is all the time. This is useful to all.
Teachers need the freedom, flexibility, and autonomy to meet the student’s needs based on their training and expertise not on arbitrary dictates from those with no contact with the students, parents, or teachers.
“Steady Improvement" doesn’t have the propaganda impact that NCLB does, but it is doable, measurable, useful for comparisons of all kinds, and based on reality, not wishful thinking.
» left by Dave Potchak from Central PA (1 year 211 days ago.)
Good article Dr. rose. As an educator (32 years) in PA schools, there's one aspect of success in schools that no one wants to address. Why do we still heterogenously group students, bust butt to teach the slow learners, at the expense of the talented and gifted. I am and always will be at a loss to explain that. I would enjoy hearing from you. dave potchak Respond to this comment
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Article added to SearchWarp.com on Tuesday, March 06, 2007 View other articles written by Robert Rose(163)
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