As Orwell cautions, "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
For nearly three decades, the U.S. has implemented bureaucratic education reform through an accountability model to address historic failures reflected in the schools but created by the social inequities we never name, never acknowledge, and never address.
The harsh reality is that society and schools have a symbiotic relationship that allows inequality to remain because those who win the game always believe the rules are fair--and fear changing the rules since new rules could mean new winners.
Thus, educational reform must come with political reform, and both must be the result of new ways in which we speak about our society and our schools, including the following:
à ‚¬ Poverty is a powerful force in any person's life, but even more so in the lives of children. Childhood poverty is the dominant influence on any child's academic achievement; therefore, society needs to address childhood poverty and also insure that our public schools stop perpetuating inequity in the schools through tracking, teacher assignments, authoritarian discipline practices, and narrow standards-based high-stakes testing.
à ‚¬ "Accountability" must be reframed as a term and as a political message. To hold any free human accountable for behavior chosen and conducted by that human is a fact of "freedom" since "freedom" does not mean "license." As a harsh example, I am free to smoke cigarettes, but not free to impose that smoke on others who choose not to smoke; yet, my choice to smoke carries with it my accountability for the health consequences of my actions. However, the political use of "accountability" in the school reform movement fails to comply with the basic tenants of ethical accountability. Teacher accountability (including the recent move toward value-added measures) ignores that teachers have little or no choice in the standards imposed on their work, the tests used to hold them accountable, and (most significantly) the lives their students live outside of their classrooms. Teacher accountability as it is now being practiced is a political distraction and little more than holding teachers accountable as nonsmokers for the consequences of second-hand smoke.
à ‚¬ The accountability flaw is directly linked to the mixed messages and policies related to teaching as a profession. The political and public charge that teachers must be held accountable as all professions are seems always to call for only part of the conditions for "professional"--accountability. Teachers must be afforded professional autonomy first before professional accountability can be both ethical and potentially productive. Instead of holding teachers accountable for bureaucratic standards and tests not of their making and test scores produced by the students more strongly correlated with those students' lives than anything the teacher can provide, teachers must be allowed to practice their profession while being held accountable for that which they can control--the opportunities to learn in the classes each day. Their content, their lessons, their assessments.
In Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the audience is forced to consider the power of the accusers. John Proctor challenges us with "Is the accuser always holy now?" And in the graphic novel Watchmen, the work is carried by the refrain "Who watches the watchmen?"
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