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Teacher Accountability? It's About Time!

Reader Comment:

Mr. Brady hits a home run --again!! I have yet to figure out why teachers seem to be the only ones who are supposed to be accountable. What about accountability of parents, students, politicians and taxpayers? . . .

Believing that teacher accountability is the only solution to student achievement is beyond naive ----closer to "voodoo education." I think few, besides Mr. Brady, have really analyzed the root causes of poor student performance. Those who have seem to be largely ignored by politicians and the media. Many teachers know what the real issues are, too -- but nobody wants to listen to them. You can't really take advice from people you're blaming, can you?

by Marion Brady

Once upon a time teachers assigned grades, and that was pretty much that.
Oh, occasionally a kid would argue that a particular grade was unfair, or
complain so loudly that parents or an administrator would get involved, but
that was relatively rare.

About a generation ago, acceptance of teacher judgment about the quality of
student work began to disappear. Waving the "standards and accountability!"
banner, leaders of business and industry convinced politicians that this
generation's teachers (unlike those they remembered from their own
schooling) couldn't be trusted to evaluate learner performance. Today's
teachers, they were sure, suffered from "the soft bigotry of low
expectations."

What drives the campaign to discredit teacher judgment isn't clear. Some
are convinced there's a long-running, behind-the-scenes attempt to undermine
confidence in public schools to pave the way for privatizing them. Others
think the loss of faith has been engineered by testing companies to expand
the lucrative market for standardized tests and test prep materials. Still
others blame it on naïve policymakers who don't understand the vast
limitations of machine-scored tests

Whether for one of these or some other reason, "accountability" is now a
major issue. It's widely believed that if America doesn't shape up,
scientists and engineers from beyond our borders will soon be eating our
technological lunch. Accompanying that belief is a second one, that the
best way to keep track of how America stands in relation to the competition
is to give the same test to every kid on the planet and compare the scores.

We have a problem. We've put all our quality-monitoring eggs in the
standardized testing basket, but the only thing computer-scored tests can
measure with absolute precision is short-term memory. Short-term memory has
its uses, but a good one doesn't turn a kid into a good mathematician, good
scientist, good engineer, or good anything else. Expertise and
accomplishment require intention, interest, insight, imagination,
creativity, and probably a brain wired in a particular manner, all combined
in a way little understood, incapable of being directly taught, and
impossible to measure with a standardized test.

We seem to be over a barrel. To maintain educational quality, we need to
monitor and measure performance. But learner qualities and capabilities most
deserving of being evaluated are far too complex for our crude tests to
monitor.

Fortunately, the barrel is of our own making, and can be rolled aside.
Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, in his 1916
Presidential Address to the Mathematical Association of England, pointed the
way. "The second-handedness of the learned world," he said, "is the secret
of its mediocrity." When kids are merely trying to remember something read
in a textbook or heard in teacher talk, they're in the secondhand-knowledge
business. When they're figuring out how to make sense of something
complicated and important that can be seen and touched, they're in the
firsthand-knowledge business. Switching from secondhand to firsthand
student work changes the game and therefore everything that follows,
including the kinds of tests that are necessary.

A first-hand-knowledge assignment for a high school social studies class:
"How are major decisions about your school's day-to-day operation made, and
what general conclusions and attitudes about decision-making and governing
might you carry into adulthood as a consequence?"

A first-hand-knowledge assignment for a high school science class: "What's
happening to the solid waste your school generates, and if the system for
dealing with it continues to function as it presently does, what will be the
likely consequences for future generations?"

A first-hand-knowledge assignment for a high school humanities class:
Graffiti fits dictionary definitions of literature. Reading "between the
lines," what does local graffiti have to say about the interests, concerns,
and problems of its creators? Do they differ from yours? How? Why?

That's first-hand, real-world work, and what comes out of it is first-hand
knowledge. It's unquestionably relevant. Its intellectual challenges are
qualitative rather than quantitative. It forces secondhand knowledge to
play its proper, supportive role. Its intellectual payoff is immediate and
continuous. It connects directly to larger issues of life, liberty, and
happiness. It erases the arbitrary, artificial, intellect-limiting
boundaries between school subjects. And the shift of emphasis for learners
from simple memory exercises to complex logic tends to shake up perceptions
of who's smart and who's less so in surprising and healthy ways.

By any measure, firsthand work is work worth doing. But it's work that, by
its very nature, can't be standardized, so evaluating it can't be
standardized. No way can Educational Testing Service, McGraw-Hill, Pearson,
or some other remote corporate entity write a machine-scored test to
determine the quality of what's happening in the heads of kids as they
wrestle with firsthand, real-world work.

How, then, can performance be monitored? In the same way performance was
monitored for the decades before the campaign to discredit teachers began:
by returning respect and authority to those best positioned by time and
experience to make the judgment calls - returning it to classroom teachers.

Blamed by business leaders for problems over which they have no control,
scape-goated by platitude-prone politicians, ignored by educationally
challenged policymakers, mauled by mainstream media unwilling to look past
the conventional wisdom, it's possible that classroom teachers have lost
confidence in their ability to evaluate student work. But as long as those
in authority think that sorting, labeling, and assigning numbers to kids has
something to do with educating, classroom teachers are the only people who
know the game and the players well enough to meet their demands.

Are teacher judgments subjective? Of course. So what? For
comprehensiveness, reliability and usefulness, no other approach to
performance evaluation comes even close. (And it's a helluva lot cheaper.)

It's years of time and many billions of dollars too late to undo the damage
done to the young by the standardized testing fad, but next school year
would be a good time for an aroused citizenry to demand that a salvage
operation be undertaken.


— Marion Brady
Truthout
2010-04-19
http://www.truthout.org/teacher-accountability-its-about-time58698

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