Accountability+in+Education

This is a passion of mine. I do think we need accountability in education, and unfortunately, none yet exists. Testing companies have put something in place that is terrible and is ruining education in the US - and is not holding eanyone accountable. Accountability has been supplanted by a test and punish criteria that will simply punish schools with economincally disadvantaged, hispanic and or special needs populations.

The problem is that teachers and administrators have been side lined in the fight, since they are not speaking the language of conservatives. Ever since the Reagon administration, there has been a huge public pressure to reform and hold schools accountable. Instead of offering a solution, teachers and schools fought the suggestions of the right. A vacuum was thus created and the result was No Child Left Behind.

There is no easy way to hold education accountable - and it is too easy to twist the data out there. No Child Left Behind, and even Obama's Race to the top are terrible pieces of legislation with massive consequences to poorly formulated testing regimes. They are forcing schools to close and reopen - and slowly, we are beginning to realize that the problem is not these schools - it is the lack of resources and the heavy handed oversight on schools with populations of challenging students (poor, special needs, and english language learners). No school will ever succeed in the circumstances that most of these schools deal with. Even the success stories turn out to be short-lived. The problems of poverty and special needs cannot be solved by the schools. Closing and reopening schools and providing choice only create massive upheaval for the students and leave the most at-risk students with nothing. English language learners can never be expected to meet the same standards as everyone else, until years after they become proficient in English (at which point, they are no longer considered Enligh language learners!). Students from the lowest socio economic levels will always be at a disadvantage, since their parents cannot afford the enrichment opportunities provided to wealthier students, and all too often they lack decent education themselves. Student with special needs will never, as a group, meet the same standards as everyone else.

There is no simple solution, so I am changing my career and becoming a teacher - primarily to learn as much as I can and help, in the words of Diane Ravitch, to think like a statesmen and develop a plan that politicians can embrace. We need to bring together the left and the right. We need to find solutions that work and implement them - and stop implementing ideological solutions with no track record of success.

In the pages to be added here, I will document my journey of exploration of how to hold schools accountable - how schools can hold students accountable, and how we can end up with an educational system that is the model of the world.

The first addition is a link to the resources presented by Diane Ravitch. I have been most impressed by her evan handed and scholarly approach to school reform. Here is a recent lecture of her describing her analysis of current school reform.

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She has published a great book, //The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.// More information is available on her website: www.dianeravitch.com

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