"Accountability" is a term that we hear lot in education. Teachers want to hold students accountable; teachers want parents to be accountable' administrators want to hold teachers accountable, but few want to dig in to accountability. The fact is accountability and holding people accountable takes a lot of energy and introspection. For when someone feels we are not being accountable, our job is to show that we indeed are or work to make sure that we take responsibility for whatever, and work to make sure that we are indeed being accountable for our work.
I will be the first to tell you that educators have a very difficult job, and we are asked to do a lot, and teachers are the nucleus of any educational institution. However, as educators we are quick to throw up smoke screens to explain why X,Y, or Z was not successful. We are all guilty at some point of the pitfalls to avoid taking responsibility for learning and teaching: The parents are not engaged, the administration expects too much, there are just not enough resources, I do not get paid what I am worth (does anybody?), that all takes time that I do not have, the students are disrespectful, the state mandates make it impossible for me to teach...just let me teach and leave me alone!!! I am not suggesting here that these are not at times valid arguments and these happen daily in schools. What we have to do as educators is find ways to do our work and be effective despite some of these things, and we need to spend our energy overcoming these and not dwelling on them as excuses for not being effective.
Do not get me wrong! I am blessed to work in a school with extremely talented teachers who care and are fantastic at what they do, and most of them are effective, but all of them (and me) have been guilty of throwing up these screens to avoid accountability. In fact, I have been known to throw them up for the teacher in conferences or post evaluation sessions, and I could kick myself when I do it. The fact of the matter is that we are at schools to teach and make sure that students learn. I believe that all students can learn. They may not meet all of the goals or every expectation that you have, but they should grow from the day you have them until the last day you teach them. (I know, there is a teacher out there now saying that if the student came to school, then I could teach him or her. She is NEVER here!) I do not want to minimize the problems that some students have, and I know that there are some that have attendance issues or other issues that are far from our control, but what I am talking about is reaching the kids we do have and working to ensure that these students are learning.
Accountability for teachers is interesting. Teachers are in the business of accountability. We check progress, we grade papers to give feedback, we get undone when kids don't do homework or classwork (as we should if the work is legitimate- later post), but yet many of us do not want to be held accountable because we take issue with the accountability measures. Well, we have to measure effectiveness, and I am the first to admit that there are many ways, both qualitative and quantitative to measure effectiveness. We do tend to hone in on the quantitative measurement logically as this is something we can point to as a measurement, I do fault school leadership generally in this arena as we have placed a great deal on test scores and academic readiness data, etc., however, these are important-- so much so that I will blog about assessment data separately. For now, it is important for us to pay attention to all kinds of data and hold ourselves accountable. I hear all the time: We have to teach to the test, these state exams are ruining my classroom, let me just TEACH, and leave me alone.
We as educators are always drawing comparisons between ourselves and other professions, when many of us have not been in other professions and the world of education is different than the world of business. Believe me, accountability is the cornerstone of any successful business or profession. I read recently on a Facebook comment about teaching: "Do doctors get bonuses when they have more healthy patients or get penalized when their patients are sick?" I am sure that if a doctor has repeated cases of sick patients, his business will drop off, and if he or she has multiple patients die (heaven forbid), then there will be accountability. If a lawyer loses case after case, then likely no one will ask for services. On the other side, if a lawyer wins many cases, then he or she may have more business than they can handle, and there is a bonus of sorts with more business. I am not saying that I am a proponent of merit pay or bonus, etc., but what I am saying is that if year after year a teacher, an administrator, a doctor, a nurse, a pilot, or anybody continues to be ineffective with no intervention or no signs of improvement, he or she should not continue to practice. Ask most people and they will tell you that there are little things in their jobs that are not the best or "useless." Accountability is not one of those; the method of accountability may be. One of the issues in schools is that ineffective educators (teachers, counselors, administrators) continue to be ineffective and there is little accountability, so the cycle continues. As an administrator and as a teacher, I say bring on the measurements of accountability because if I am doing what I should be doing daily, yearly, I will get results....and I have. When I get bad results, I reflect back on that to make them better next time. I cannot lay back and make 3000 excuses as to why my results were not what they should be, but I have to find ways to change the results. The great Steve Jobs, said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Each day that I am an educator I am inventing [creating] the results because I am focused on the how and not the why.
I am not saying that all teachers feel this way, but what I am saying is that the philosophy is becoming more pervasive in the school, but this makes sense as we hear more about testing and testing tied to performance, etc., etc. When we as a school come to this mentality or allow a group to bring the school down with this philosophy, then we have begun a steep decline. These are big stakes and they are not all right, but here is the advice that I give to new teachers or to teachers who are willing to listen. Teach the standards, that is what we have always been asked to do. Use your creativity to reach multiple learners as long as you are teaching the curriculum. Take risks and don't worry about the tests. The tests will take care of themselves. These are measurements that we administer at the end of a course or a year, but you will already know what your kids can do. I like the advice that one of our Instructional coaches gave to a group of our STEM teachers recently: The test is 20-25% of the grade, do not make it become 100%. The most dynamic classrooms that I have been in are those where the test is not mentioned daily. Believe me, students do not need practice on how to bubble an answer sheet. They need all the rich lessons that teachers say they want to teach but cannot. I am here to say you can and you should. The kids deserve all that you have. Let your drive be their learning and not your accountability measure.
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