Accountability

First off, apologies. It has been quite a while since I've written, but I have a good reason! I got a new teaching job! So my wife and I have moved out of Colorado Springs, very close to where I grew up in Denver, to teach at a new school, which actually is what has prompted me to write this post!

Accountability is one of the big buzz words in education right now. That's sort of what the whole concept was behind adding No Child Left Behind, so that people are accountable. Here's my problem, the wrong people, in my opinion, are being held accountable. This new district where I'm teaching does things based off of President Obama's "Race to the Top" edict of education. What this does is changes the way in which salary is paid to teachers, and the way that tenure is decided (at least in Colorado). Pay is no longer based off of years of experience, it is based off of data that the teachers provide that shows that their students are, in fact, learning. At first glance, most people seem alright with it. Naturally it isn't a terrible thing to have this as a bit of feedback into your pay, and if it is clear that your students are not learning, then it is clear that you probably shouldn't be teaching because something is just missing. But here's the problem, there is still no accountability to the student. In my humble opinion, which I would guess might be shared by most teachers, this is merely something that adds fuel to the already blazing fire of just shoveling students along. Any intelligent teacher that knows they aren't doing a great job is going to just make sure that the right amount of people are passing so that they don't get identified as a bad teacher. Now, I'm not arguing that those are the specific people that we are trying to get out of there in the first place, but shouldn't things be focused on student achievement for the sake of the student, and not the teacher?

My mother recently told me a little story about something that happened to a student teacher where she works (my mother works in the English Resource Center of a high school). There was a student teacher who had a tough time with a certain class of students. They gave her a lot of trouble. Other than just the obvious things of misbehaving in class, not doing assignments properly, these students were smart enough to know the ways to really hit her below the belt. The teacher she was working with models his class in a way that he gives the students benchmark tests throughout the course of the semester in order to assess how they are learning. Well, these students know that these things are more for the teacher than they are for them, and when it came time for her to give these students their test, the students asked "If we do badly on this, does that mean that you get in trouble?" THIS, is the exact problem with the above plan. The student know that it affects the teachers and the school itself far more than it actually affects them, so what is their incentive? This is right up there with the assistant principal at my last school, who shall remain nameless, that called one of my colleagues and told her she had too many seniors failing her class and just needed to "bump a few up a bit" even though these were students who had not turned in a bit of work all semester long, or had not even bothered to come to class most of the semester. Again, the things that are not being considered in these plans is what happens if the student DESERVES the F?

Continuously we hear all these same complaints about education. They need to be funded better, we need better teachers, students shouldn't be just shoveled along they need to prove that they have learned the material. Yet, every single time somebody "does something" about education, it never EVER solves any of these problems. Parents come in and argue with their kid's teachers because they want their kid to pass when these parents may have never done a single bit of checking on the kid all year long until they got a report card. You never hear a parent say to a kid, "well maybe you deserved it." It is always, "this teacher is out to get my perfect little angel!!" Again, things boil down to a fundamental lack of respect for education, and educators.

I am all about being held accountable. If I'm doing something wrong, or something that I'm doing could be done better, tell me, but don't dock my pay. That, and we need to start reminding people that part of going to school is proving that you learned something while you are there, and that burden does not lie on the teachers, the students have to prove that they have learned it, not the teacher. So if a kid gets an F, try and think before you sit there and say, well golly, that teacher let that kid down. That is only one of the many possibilities for that situation. Should my pay be docked because Johnny, or Sally never came to class and failed? Should my pay be docked because Billy or Susie never handed in a single bit of work? Should I be denied tenure for these same reasons?

If there is a way to responsibly assess these things, then I'd be all for making it a part of my salary schedule, because then I would know exactly what is expected of me. As it is now, teachers won't know, and many teachers will shovel kids along that need to be failed. It's the same problem all over again. When are we going to learn?