Accountability Lights a Fuse
It finally happened. I suffered my first legitimate ‘accountability breakdown’ the other day after our school’s academically gifted teacher stopped by my room. “I need you to sign a few papers, Bill,” she said, “verifying that you are going to provide a differentiated curriculum for your AG students.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I’ve been signing similar papers for 15 years. Essentially, each document details the level of service that my kids are entitled to receive. They’re designed simply as a reminder of the importance of meeting the needs of the gifted students in my classes.
Instead, they simply set me off!
“I’m sick of being held accountable,” I snapped. “Do you have to sign any forms documenting your work? Better yet, do teachers beyond reading and math have to sign these papers? What guarantees are we getting on the results of everyone else working in this building?”
No joke — I was borderline hateful and definitely mean.
As our AG teacher beat a hasty retreat, I was left to vent to anyone who would listen. My frustration was only fueled by a comment made earlier in the year by a district data guru suggesting that the teachers of my team were “decidedly average” and “somewhat complacent” when it came to reading instruction. His evidence: Our school’s standardized test scores.
“That’s it!” I shouted, “I want any one of the dozens of untested positions in our school. Wouldn’t it be nice to have no accountability for once?!”
Picking up the pieces after my outburst has made me realize that our nation’s efforts to “hold teachers accountable” have changed who I am as an educator. Once a passionate artist driven by human relationships and by creative exploration with my kids, I am now nothing more than a technician studying the numbers and trying to produce results on end-of-grade exams.
Constant pressure and criticism — a tool that society has seemed to embrace to drive change in education — has left me wondering whether I even want to work in a classroom any longer. At every turn, fingers seem to point at me because I teach a tested subject. Each year, I pensively await the results of exams knowing that drops in “the numbers” will land me in hot water — no matter how hard I worked the year before.
Some days, I’m even left to wonder whether what I do each day can really be called “teaching.” It certainly doesn’t resemble the work that I embraced early in my career.
Is my reaction to our nation’s emphasis on results somehow irrational or perfectly understandable? Have ‘accountability breakdowns’ become more common in your school? How can school leaders support teachers who rest under the never-ending glare of end of grade exams?
Are ‘accountability breakdowns’ another unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind? If so, are they a consequence that we’re comfortable with? How can we hold teachers accountable for performance without destroying who they are as people?
It finally happened. I suffered my first legitimate ‘accountability breakdown’ the other day after our school’s academically gifted teacher stopped by my room. “I need you to sign a few papers, Bill,” she said, “verifying that you are going to provide a differentiated curriculum for your AG students.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, I’ve been signing similar papers for 15 years. Essentially, each document details the level of service that my kids are entitled to receive. They’re designed simply as a reminder of the importance of meeting the needs of the gifted students in my classes.
Instead, they simply set me off!
“I’m sick of being held accountable,” I snapped. “Do you have to sign any forms documenting your work? Better yet, do teachers beyond reading and math have to sign these papers? What guarantees are we getting on the results of everyone else working in this building?”
No joke — I was borderline hateful and definitely mean.
As our AG teacher beat a hasty retreat, I was left to vent to anyone who would listen. My frustration was only fueled by a comment made earlier in the year by a district data guru suggesting that the teachers of my team were “decidedly average” and “somewhat complacent” when it came to reading instruction. His evidence: Our school’s standardized test scores.
“That’s it!” I shouted, “I want any one of the dozens of untested positions in our school. Wouldn’t it be nice to have no accountability for once?!”
Picking up the pieces after my outburst has made me realize that our nation’s efforts to “hold teachers accountable” have changed who I am as an educator. Once a passionate artist driven by human relationships and by creative exploration with my kids, I am now nothing more than a technician studying the numbers and trying to produce results on end-of-grade exams.
Constant pressure and criticism — a tool that society has seemed to embrace to drive change in education — has left me wondering whether I even want to work in a classroom any longer. At every turn, fingers seem to point at me because I teach a tested subject. Each year, I pensively await the results of exams knowing that drops in “the numbers” will land me in hot water — no matter how hard I worked the year before.
Some days, I’m even left to wonder whether what I do each day can really be called “teaching.” It certainly doesn’t resemble the work that I embraced early in my career.
Is my reaction to our nation’s emphasis on results somehow irrational or perfectly understandable? Have ‘accountability breakdowns’ become more common in your school? How can school leaders support teachers who rest under the never-ending glare of end of grade exams?
Are ‘accountability breakdowns’ another unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind? If so, are they a consequence that we’re comfortable with? How can we hold teachers accountable for performance without destroying who they are as people?
posted by Bill Ferriter at 12:27 PM
2 Comments:
As a person who has observed many classrooms (not as an evaluator) and interacted with the teachers, my take on the very common frustration with the 'accountability' is the distance of the results from the actions in the classroom. That problem is an issue as the cause/effect between the classroom and the test includes so many untracked variables. The impression (truth?) is that all the other variables are being ignored and the primary cause (blame?) is the teacher.
Two suggestions:
First, teach the very best you know how (and continually strive to be better), and ignore the outcome scores, both personally and professionally. The reason for teaching or learning, isn't to get an 'A'. If your best isn't good enough for the system, let them tell you so, provide more resources, or fire you - but if you have done the very best you can, that's all you can do. You can sleep well with that knowledge.
Second: work with colleagues to 'Take Back the Day' and strive to figure out what's happening in your classroom and in your school, and then set about to make whatever changes are needed to do the best job of teaching possible.
When I say find out what's happening, I'm really referring to an approach to observing that is not evaluative, but collaborative. I developed it, and optional software to support it, and call it the Data-Based Observation Method. In this method, the classroom teacher is the designer of the observation and the one to reflect, interpret, and make any changes based on the data collected by the observer (another teacher, a student, parent, aide, -- even an administrator).
My blog about this is at http://data-based-observation.blogspot.com/
My website is www.ecove.net The software is commercial, but you can implement the method without it.
Hello.
I am not a teacher yet. But I read your blog and totally understand your frustration with the accountability regulatioins.
Unfortunately, these regulations are not aimed at you at all. I can see from your blog that you are an excellent teacher and will always be (inspite of administrators efforts to bog you down with paperwork). But it is for those teachers who are not doing anything but surfing the web in classrooms.
Put yourself in an adminstrator's shoes, when the system fails, where do you look for leaks and holes to fix? You look everywhere. So, the good as well as the bad teahcers have to be examined and their practices have to be examined in order to find the leaks to fix.
Also, I understand that test scores are not the end of all education. But it is what is used by colleges and other institutions to equate students. If you want your students to stand a chance in this rate race to good colleges and universities, you have to bite the bullet. You may know that your students have learned a lot but how do you prove it to the world? Unfortunately, through external unbiased tests.
Just the views of a college of educaiton student.
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