Some thoughts on "accountability in education," from a former elementary teacher.

In a comment I made suggesting that George Lakoff be framed with a toilet seat, I offered a few alternatives to "framing." Rob Kall tossed out five challenges in reply, that I said I'd try to address. I chose his challenge on education first, since I taught elementary school for twenty years. I also chose it since I wrote an article on the topic, circa spring '89, for Perspectives Magazine (for Idaho School Administrators).

One of my alternatives to "framing" was, "" educate kids so they can read and comprehend"" Rob came back, "This is a good thing. But the right wing is trying to do that too and they control a good portion of the educational system. Look at the new Texas school book disaster. You can't just assume that putting kids through public school creates adults who challenge and think. The truth is that a huge portion of the population never learned how to critically analyze, question and think."

Of course Rob is correct, and I don't pretend that my answers come without challenges of their own. We're talking about nearly everything I believe progressives are about: bringing change to Empire and empowering people, rather than skewering and roasting them. My attempt is to offer specifics that go beyond words, as I think we all need to do, rather than knocking ourselves silly with exactly how we frame things. "Accountability" was coming into vogue in '89, and this bugbear has grown larger since, particularly under the Bush and Obama Administrations (it was interesting that one of Bush's first debacles was the "No Child Left Behind Act," disguised under the notion of "accountability in schools"--stomping on the minds of defenseless kids for his first act. But alas, my article:

"Accountability" has become for many adults akin to the bells to which Pavlov's dogs salivated. By that, I mean the word itself has developed a probability of eliciting a predictable, reflexive response. For surely it appears reasonable to join the parade of politicians, which asserts that teachers should be "accountable" for their actions in the classroom.

My hope is that we can that we can take a look at that response with less reflex, and a bit more thought. I suggest we begin by considering the heart of the word "accountable." The word "count" means "to call off numbers of the units of a collection or an amount in their regular order of progression, to enumerate, as to count a flock, or to count to a hundred."

So too, "accountability in the classroom" has come to mean that a teacher should be performing in a way that his or her actions, or the consequences of those actions, are somehow countable, measurable, or systematically quantifiable--presumably by some competent administrator or testing instrument and thus, the underlying assumption seems to be, easily accessible to the scrutiny of the public eye. In this manner, educators can be "accountable" to the public which employs them.

This is a tantalizing carrot to hold before the public, especially a public which likes to view itself as scientifically oriented and objective in its search for solutions to society's problems.

However, as a third grade teacher attempting to do what I intuitively and logically perceive as "best" for the minds and lives of the twenty-six 8 and 9 year-olds in my class, I find a wide and unbridgeable gap between "accountability" and what I must call "responsibility."

Those things I do which appear most important in the lives of children do not seem to be "countable" by any stretch of my imagination; on the other hand, if I am to hold myself to things which are strictly "countable," I would be doing a huge disservice to the kids I'm trying to educate.

A short list of important goals for me as an educator include the following: fostering a sense of wonder in children; creating excitement about learning; developing skills for social problem solving, including the ability to make friends; helping children feel good about themselves; instilling the desire to read, to write, and to play with numbers; and encouraging good manners and courteousness. Yet these goals, as near as I can tell, are 100% not countable and essentially not measurable.

My argument is that the art of teaching, or seriously doing things that matter with children, goes beyond the quantifiable. We can no more measure the real effectiveness of a teacher on some external yardstick than we can determine the value of the Mona Lisa by weighing the paint; we can no more arrive at a judgment on the quality of student-teacher interactions through quantified analysis than we can determine the complexities of a forest ecosystem by counting up board feet of timber. Teaching may well be a science up to a point, but after that it is pure art, and, I believe, not even accessible to anyone with a purely behavioristic mindset.

Of course there are relevant indicators that any attuned educator is likely to look for and, on a personal level, interpret as positive or negative feedback. But such things are at best fortuitous and indirect clues that one is or isn't doing the right thing in the classroom. For this article I can only offer you a sampling of real feedback that I interpret as relevant: parents who tell me their children are always talking about what we do in class; the girl whose mother told me she cried because she couldn't come to school; students who bring back library books about what we have been studying in class; children who get visibly upset because they miss writing on a given day; the unbridled excitement I saw when we had "engineering workshops" brought in by a local college; the thrill of kids when they were doing a special "construction" program, sponsored by a local museum; the joy of discovery when they went through "archeological" hands-on activities, also brought in by local specialists trained in that area. The list goes on, but I trust you get the idea. Young humans are naturally happy, inspired, and learning, when exposed to a positive and stimulating educational environment.

These things tell me, at least to some degree, that I am successful as a classroom teacher. Yet such feedback is scarcely countable, measurable, or quantifiable in any sense that an administrator can report to the public. Further, it has no relationship to the test scores on Iowa Basic Tests, and not a hint of a connection to any teaching behavior which an administrator, however capable, might note and somehow "count" in a classroom observation.

Many student behaviors, on the other hand, are countable or quantifiable in some way. We can measure mastery of math facts and skills (at some specific point in time, though disuse, attitude, and other factors may quickly erode the validity of our measurement); we can determine a student's ability to syllabicate words; we can measure reading comprehension, at least in the lower ranges of the skill; we can evaluate one's ability to alphabetize; we can ascertain, for the most part, some level of understanding in science and social studies.

My question is, "So what?" What has this to do with the human spirits we are trying to encourage and guide, inform and inspire? What does this comparison of one student to another have to do with the vital inner lives of the children we are working with? With the desire of children to create, discover, and reflect upon the world? With instilling appreciation for the natural world, as we might accomplish on an afternoon hike? With building a source of inner strength to deal or cope with problems in ones' home life?

By focusing only on the most tangible and measurable results an educator might be "accountable" for, be it student performance on tests or objective measures of teacher behavior, we are subtracting valuable time from the important matters we ought to be attending to in the classroom.

Each day we make choices related to these issues: In writing, do we stick to the measurable mechanics of parts of speech, punctuation, and grammatical rules, as found in workbooks, or do we go outside to watch clouds, or perhaps take time to do a play, in hopes that we will infuse young minds with a desire to want to write; in math, do we strive for success in the mindless but measurable manipulation of numbers, and perhaps even get third graders to start long division, knowing that we do at the expense of deep understanding, curious play, and the sheer joy of tinkering with numbers?

In reading, do we encourage and foster the quantifiable activities found on worksheets and outlined in a tidy curriculum--looking for main ideas, ordering sentences, recalling details, finding antonyms, and so on--or do we get on with the business of appreciating literature by reading and discussing and thinking about what the author is telling us, and applying it to our lives? (My class enjoys eight or nine readers each year only because we don't waste time on soul-deadening but highly countable pages of workbooks). Or do we spend an hour in the evening counting up scores on papers with our little red pencils, or use that same hour to prepare exciting activities in science, writing, and math lessons?

As a classroom teacher, I confront choices such as these on an hourly basis. And I am forced to ask, shall I go for the merely countable, or aim higher, to those things that move the spirit? Shall I turn kids on and fan the flame I find in their souls, or shall I spend my creative juices boxing them into squares I find on, say, a Macmillan math summary chart? Perhaps it is my ignorance, but I am unable to perceive these choices as anything other than mutually exclusive.

To be accountable in the narrow sense that we have come to use the word, in my opinion, is to be irresponsible in the larger social sense. For if we are working with the infinite range of human behaviors and potential of the young people entrusted to us, then we must depart at once from the comfortable and countable and move into the realms of intuition, common sense, spontaneity, judgment, wisdom, and best guesses--which among other factors, are all patently unquantifiable entities.

Even if one were to accept that it is desirable to run a classroom in an "accountable" manner--that is with all activities being fully "countable," and the teacher "accountable" for them--still we have a problem. Consider a teacher who has done everything in her power to teach that 7 + 8 = 15. But still three children can't master the fact. Is the teacher now accountable for this "failure," or shall we hold the student to blame? In either case, there is likely to be precious little we can ultimately do. Shall we deduct pay from the teacher's salary, or shall we hold the students in second grade till they reach puberty, in hopes that they'll one day master the material?

The most reasonable or responsible choice is probably to pass the students along, with the understanding (or hope) that next year's teacher will be sensitive and flexible enough to help the students respond at the appropriate level. Yet even if next year's teacher can "account" for time devoted to that particular fact for those particular students, it ought to be clear that that form of accountability does not have a bearing on the teacher's unquantifiable relationship with those students, or even on the teacher's creativity in presenting 7 + 8.

The mad rush I see and hear for accountability may well be a cover-up for what I feel is a frightening lack of responsibility. By speaking in the narrow terms which one must do to address what is countable, one shifts the public's attention from those things that do matter in the real lives of real children, and puts the public's attention on numbers, standard deviations, stanines, and other quantifiable irrelevancy--how much easier to speak of the board feet of a forest than to try to understand the unfathomable complexities of its life!

The sad fact to me is that with all the talk and hoopla about "accountability," we have as a nation completely shunned our responsibility, not just to children in our schools, but to our planet, to our species, and ultimately to ourselves. How can we honestly consider ourselves responsible to children when we allow the overcrowding we now see in our classrooms? How can we consider ourselves responsible when we stand idly by, as we prepare to make nuclear weapons that might well destroy our species? How do we seriously answer the 23 year-old who wrote to the late Ann Landers (again, I wrote this in 1989), in terms of what we are doing that is responsible? Consider but a small part of what this young woman wrote:

"" We have overpopulation, the environment is being destroyed, our natural resources are dwindling. People are oppressed, starving and killing each other. There are enough weapons to blow up the world we live in 40 times! AIDS continues to spread and there is not vaccine or cure."

This woman would have been a kindergarten student when I was in my first year of teaching. What conceivable meaning might she find in such empty words as: "Well, we are trying to do thing that are countable in our classrooms."

By preoccupying ourselves with accountability in an insignificant bureaucratic sense, we are escaping responsibility in the grandest human sense. We are being irresponsible to the real lives of the progenitors of our race, we are failing to nurture out children psychologically and spiritually, and we are neglecting to develop and present to our kids that wholly unquantifiable, perhaps unfathomable aspect of ourselves, which people wiser than I have called "our humanity." It is a sorry trade-off for any form of rubber-stamp accountability. For the bottom line is that the truly countable classroom is the truly dead classroom, as surely as the truly countable forest is headed down the rail on x number of freight cars.

What, then, might we look to in order to see that we are serving our children as responsible educators?

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.)