Unfortunately for any paper-oriented administrator, and a perhaps rightfully insecure public, the answers are not available in a quantitative format. In fact, we must look into a qualitative realm that may not even be perceivable to much of the public and, I'm afraid, to a number of administrators. The perceiver of what matters in the classroom must have an awareness that is expansive enough to encompass the unquantifiable. Is the teacher intellectually alive? Is the teacher loving and caring with kids? Is the teacher socially conscious? Is the teacher interacting in a synergistic manner with the students? What qualitative description might be applied to the aura of the small yet vital universe of a given classroom?
Even if it were possible to quantify such entities, to do so would be to demean and diminish them.
As a parent, I have had two boys come home on occasion with dragging rear-ends, lousy graders, and hatred of teachers and school. As I look to the classrooms where such phenomena are most pronounced, I discover fully "accountable" teachers, yet ones I do not consider to be responsible--they do not seem responsible for their own mental life, they do not seem responsible in their caring for children, they do not seem responsible in their attitude toward the survival of the human race. Yet I have little doubt that such teachers have completely mastered any measure of "accountability" which a principal or the public might legitimately require.
I am pleased, on the other hand, to note in my experience on the elementary level, that most parents tend intuitively to concern themselves with attitudes, feelings, and perceptions of their children than with this or that allegedly objective parameter (I realize, of course, that on the elementary level the thought of grades has less emotional baggage than it tends to do in upper levels, though I think similar arguments apply there). Parents I've talked with in parent-teacher conferences and elsewhere, are, almost overwhelmingly, more interested in having a child bound to and from school with enthusiasm for learning, than in hearing about how their student or school compares to some national average, or against children of the same age in China or Japan. Naturally, there is that small handful of parents who express more concern about such measures than about the intellectual or emotional life of their child. In my opinion, these parents are the most irresponsible in regards to what their child is all about.
As educator, parent, and citizen, I believe the human condition will be that much better off when we are all responsible rather than accountable. Responsible to our own intellectual and spiritual life, responsible to the human race, responsible to our planet, and responsible to the budding consciousness we find within the walls of our classrooms, which in truth, is our own unquantifiable future.
(When writing the above article, I worked as third grade teacher at the Dean Goodsell Elementary School, Shelley, Idaho.)
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