Accountability

Reading all of the news coverage as of late about teachers, teacher's unions, contracts, NCLB, you name it, is enough to make me want to run naked through the streets of Washington, D.C. or okay, closer to home, Springfield, shouting, "Don't you people get it????" We are in the middle of hiring in my building right now, and in the middle of rewriting curriculum, and in the middle of scheduling for next year, so I have been processing "what's wrong with education" from a lot of angles. I have finally decided that it is accountability. And this accountability has to come in the form of people. Here is what I mean:

In school A, the teachers are evaluated one a year or once every two years by an administrator. This evaluation may take a few days or maybe a week. At the end of the evaluation the teacher is granted an "excellent" because during the time of the evaluation there were no classroom management issues of note, the teacher and students were "on task," and the administrator hadn't had any major complaints or red flags thrown about said teacher in past year.

In school B, the teachers may be evaluated once every one or two years by an administrator, but that teacher is also evaluated/monitored/mentored by someone in that teacher's discipline who KNOWS and keeps close tabs not just on if the teacher is there and managing the classroom, but also that the teacher in question is actually teaching the curriculum. Every day. Not some days, not when the administrator is there, but every day.

We can legislate, we can rewrite, we can mandate, we can put anything on paper that we want to, but until teachers have direct, constant, and immediate accountability--to themselves, their students and to the school they serve . . . it is all not much more than politics and paperwork. And to be clear, I still believe in the Jeffersonian ideal of public education--just wish more folks had the same ideals.