At last, a view on the education process in the NYT that doesn't knock teachers...........
What should teacher accountability look
like?
We know what the current system of
accountability looks like, and it’s not pretty. Ever since the passage of No
Child Left Behind 12 years ago, teachers have been judged, far too
simplistically, based on standardized tests given to their students — tests, as
Marc S. Tucker points out in a new report, Fixing Our National Accountability
System, that are used to decide which teachers should get to keep
their jobs and which should be fired. This system has infuriated and shamed
teachers, and is a lot of the reason that teacher turnover is so high,
causing even many of the best teachers to abandon the ranks.
All of which might be worth it if this
form of accountability truly meant that public school students were getting a
better education. But, writes Tucker, “There is no evidence that it is
contributing anything to improved student performance.” Meanwhile, he adds,
test-based accountability is “doing untold damage to the profession of
teaching.”
Tucker is one of the grand old men of
education policy. In the 1970s, he worked at the National Institute of
Education, followed by a stint at the Carnegie Corporation. In 1988, he founded the National Center on
Education and the Economy, whose premise, he told me recently, is
that, in order to meet the demands of a global economy, our educational system
needs to be re-engineered for much higher performance.
Not long after founding the N.C.E.E.,
Tucker began taking a close look at countries and cities that were re-engineering
successfully. What he came away with were two insights. First was a profound
appreciation for the fact that most of the countries with the best educational
results used the same set of techniques to get there. And, second, that the
American reform methods were used nowhere else in the world. “No other country
believes that you can get to a high quality educational system simply by
instituting an accountability system,” he says. “We are entirely on the wrong
track.” His cri de coeur has been that Americans should look to what works,
instead of clinging to what doesn’t.
The main thing that works is treating
teaching as a profession, and teachers as professionals. That means that
teachers are as well paid as other professionals, that they have a career ladder,
that they go to elite schools where they learn their craft, and that they are
among the top quartile of college graduates instead of the bottom quartile.
When I suggested that American cities couldn’t afford to pay teachers the way
we pay engineers or lawyers, Tucker scoffed. With rare exception, he said, the
cost per pupil in the places with the best educational systems is less than the
American system, even though their teachers are far better paid. “They are not
spending more money; they are spending money differently,” he said.
Tucker would not abolish tests, but he
would have fewer of them. And they would have a different purpose: In the
high-performing countries, the tests exist to hold the students accountable,
rather than the teachers. Meanwhile, he writes, “in most of these countries,
the primary form of accountability for the school and its staff is high-profile
publication of the average scores for the exams for each school, often
front-page news.”
When a school falls short, instead of looking
to fire teachers, the high-performing countries “use the data to decide which
schools will receive visits from teams of expert school inspectors. These
inspectors are highly regarded educators.”
Tucker envisions the same
kind of accountability for teachers as exists for, say, lawyers in a firm —
where it is peers holding each other accountable rather than some outside
force. People who don’t pull their own weight are asked to leave. The ethos is
that people help each other to become better for the good of the firm. Those
who successfully rise through the ranks are rewarded with higher pay and
status.
Would the teachers’
unions go along with such a scheme? The unions would certainly have to shed
some of the things they now have, such as control of work rules. But they would
gain so much else: “Management would get their prerogatives back and would be
held accountable for results, but the professionals, granted far more autonomy,
would be also holding each other accountable for the quality of their work, as
professionals everywhere do.”
As our conversation was
coming to an end, Tucker told me that he was working with the State of Kentucky
to implement some of the reforms he had outlined in his report. If it works
there — and there is no reason it shouldn’t — perhaps we’ll finally get over
our fixation with test-based accountability, and finally re-engineer our
educational system the way every other successful country has.
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