School accountability runs in only one direction. When we weren't looking, those at the top were apparently given "get out of accountability free" cards. Perhaps we should be happy for them and their good fortune. It must be nice to have the little people around to take the blame -- the students and teachers and parents who just can't seem to do anything right.
We all know the rules by now, passed down from Bush to Obama without skipping a beat: demand that students, teachers, and principals be held accountable, primarily through the students' scores on standardized tests. Teachers, principals, and schools face sanctions if scores aren't high enough. Students, depending on the state where they live, shall be denied diplomas, held back in grade, or perhaps merely scolded.
But that's it; the buck stops somewhere around the teachers' lounge. It never quite finds its way to the people who really make the decisions.
Sure, it's the elected officials who control who gets what and who make the rules, but those officials are entitled to vigorously point downward, offering up shortcomings of teachers, students, parents and principals in hopes that voters won't noticed their own serious failings. And now we have the leaders of 16 of the nation's major city school districts joining in the fun of one-directional accountability. If you haven't seen it yet, go read "How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders," just published in the Washington Post.
I've already screamed and hollered about the manifesto, as a guest blogger on the Post's own "Answer Sheet." Here's part of what I wrote:
As a researcher and a parent, I yearn for an end to the over-the-top propaganda, the slick think tank reports, the educational "leaders" more interested in blaming than in solving, the wasteful sinking of taxpayer money (and educators' time) into reforms that have been shown not to work, and the stirring films that suggest that the heartbreaking denial of educational opportunities to innocent children can be miraculously solved by the latest fad. Move money from neighborhood schools to charter schools! Make children take more tests! Move money from classrooms to online learning! Blame teachers and their unions - make them easier to fire! Tie teacher jobs and salaries to student test scores!
None - literally NONE - of these gimmicks is evidence-based. Charters? Overall, they're no better than other schools. Tests? Twenty years of testing has bought us minimal improvement in scores but made learning less engaging. Online learning? Sometimes it's a good supplement for classrooms, but the research doesn't support it as a widespread substitute - unless you're an investor in one of the companies that stand to make a fortune courtesy of taxpayers. Easier routes to firing teachers? Why do states, districts and schools (including charter schools) with few if any union protections have the same patterns of student learning? Test-based merit pay, etc? Rarely has a policy been so vigorously pursued that so clearly lacks research support.
So, where do we start? With the basics. As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents' income -- it is the quality of their teacher.
It's true also that I pointed to research showing the opposite - that while teachers are a very important in-school factor, out-of-school factors related to parental educational level and family income are more strongly associated with student success. I wrote, "If the President did in fact say this, he is wrong."
Well, it turns out that the superintendent-signers played fast-and-loose with the president as well as with research. One of the Post's readers, "efavorite," pointed out that the manifesto changed the meaning of the president's words. In fact, President Obama appears to understand the research quite well, being careful to distinguish between in- and out-of-school factors.
"We know that from the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents -- it is the teacher standing at the front of the classroom."The Washington Post's commenter concludes that "the authors of this 'Manifesto,' who present themselves as educators, should be seriously rebuked for misrepresenting the President's words in this way and confusing his meaning. How dare they. It's dishonest, it's unacceptable academic research methodology and it's disrespectful to the President."
"The whole premise of Race to the Top is that teachers are the single most important factor in a child's education from the moment they step into the classroom."
Yes, it's disrespectful to the president. But don't expect these education "leaders" to be held accountable. No doubt, they'll find a way to blame students and teachers for that one, too.
At perdaily.com we posted a story that my school was graduating and giving valid diplomas to students with low elementary school reading abilities on the STAR reading exam - some as low as 2nd grade. For reporting this story under the LAUSD Whistle Blower Statute, I have been harassed with many charges and 49 days of suspension, after a prior exemplary 24 year teaching care - that will lead to my dismissal as a teacher by the LAUSD Board at the beginning of next month: http://www.perdaily.com/2010/05/we-prove-it-central-high-graduating-students-with-2nd-grade-reading-levels.html
The only reform of public education needed is to reform corrupt school districts, but to quote Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "That's not on the table." Rather the fox is allowed to guard the chicken coop.
Education is no different. Replace self-serving insurance companies with self-serving Arne Duncan, NCLB, Michelle Rhee, and others of that ilk and you have the exact same intolerable situation. Let the experts be the experts.
Thank you for your perspective. I posted this in response to another blogger this afternoon and alsoIn response to the ever popular phrase "do the math". Well I did a little math and here's an abbreviated, and totally unscientific breakdown of a year in the life of a school student:
No variables included. Just basic in school and out of school hours to determine hours of potential influences upon a child's attitudes toward all things, education being ONE of them.
If there are:
365 days per year @ 24 hrs per day = 8760 total hours per year
180 days per school year @ 7.5 hrs per day = 1350 total hours within school environment
8760 – 1350 = 7410 total hours children spend in influential environments other than school.
Of course, not accounting for time spent sleeping which, at and average of 8 hours per night assumed to be under NO particular influence = 2920 hrs
7410 - 2920 = 4490 hrs children are still outside the influences of the school environment.
4490 as opposed to 1350. I'd say parents, and other sources, have the upper hand when it comes to influencing their child's potential for academic success.
Our schools are in an uphill battle to get information to stick in the minds of children who are not taught the importance and value of education at home and by our society in general.
Respectfully submitted IMHO.
None of this means, of course, that students should spend more hours in school -- lots of valuable living and learning can and should take place out of school. Nor does it mean that the 1000 hours or so in school can't be extremely important. But of course the out-of-school factors are enormous, and this is one of many factors that counsels very strongly against policies that assume otherwise.
And I totally agree with you that a lot of very important learning does take place outside of the school environment. But if we as educators are going to be held accountable (as we should be) for the learning that's expected to take place during the hours we DO have children, then a more supportive /society/environment all around would certainly be of great assistance.
Now...how exactly do we go about achieving said supportive society?
We're also far too ready to be enthralled by fads and quick fixes.
I want national mass media--CBS, NBC, Paramount films, New York Times, Washington Post--to be part of this accountability moment and to base their education articles on the data, the research that none of the right-wing policies have worked, Not one as Welner states.
Teachers are employees like anyone else, and have to follow school board policies. I want an accountability moment for presidents of boards of education like Los Angeles school district's Cortines who was a "consultant" getting tens of thousands from a publishing companies whose books LAUSD bought. By God, I got my first accountability moment when the voters of D.C. voted in referendum against Rhee's ghastly policies. Yeah, I am hoping for more accountability moments.
The same mentality that is taking us to third world society is the same mentality that is creating our educational problems.
As always in a culture based on individualism and pay for individual performance we will find someone to blame and punish. We treat humans like b f skinner treated his dogs. I.e. reward and punishment.
In this case it is the teachers we want to punish. Which will only make this decline in educational achievement worst. I.e. cover your …… fear, the fudge factor and teach to the tests will set in big time.
Americans understand little about systemic improvement. We look for heroes in our teachers, politicians, and our military indeed in our culture.
Example: This is a culture that has 30 to 50 million of its citizens without health care insurance and ranks last in health care for all of its citizens compared to other industrialized nations and this society has looked at this as an individual problem not a systemic problem.
Example: 85 to 95% of problems and defects within an organization are systemic and you can travel this nation from one side to the other side and find few that understand this simple axiom. Twenty-five years as an organizational consultant taught me about this level of unawareness about the mindset of Americans.
It sure is not taught in our business or education schools or known by our politicians.
Thus, even though I take your point, it is more likely that individualists (realists and/or idealists) are really egocentric and self-centered (paranoid-schizoid withdrawal = emotionally 1 year old) and have no concept that others exist in 'their' world. As Schopenhauer says of the solipsist, "a madman shut up in an impregnable blockhouse," p. 229, Sartre, B&N.
http://www.all4ed.org/events/091710BriefingTeachersStudents
technology might not be the language of education, but letting children suffer our ineptitude seems to be the dominate MO for policy makers and their extentions in administrations and the classroom.