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Blog: FCAR
Speakout
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Key to accountability: What are we
locking out?
By Marion Brady
*April 22, 2004
Certain words get a free ride. When we read or hear them, they go directly to
our emotions without passing through our brains.
"Natural" is such a word. In my local supermarket, it appears in big letters on
boxes, bottles, jars, cans and wrappers, helping to sell bread, jelly, peanut
butter, baby food, eye drops, hair spray, shampoo, hand lotion, Popsicles, ice
cream, beans, cake mixes, cookies, cereal, digestive-system fiber, and much
else. Fine print may point out that the word refers to only one ingredient, but
fine print rarely gets read. If the word helps nudge a product off the shelf and
into the grocery cart, it's done its work.
We have many such words and phrases: Lite. Freedom. NEW! Democracy. Competition.
IMPROVED! We. Quality. Fat-free. Original. Organic. Liberators.
Add "accountability" to the list. Attached to "standards," as in the political
mantra "standards and accountability," it's successful in the same way that the
word "natural" is successful. It goes directly to voters' emotions without
passing through their brains.
What does the word really mean? The dictionary isn't much help. It says that one
should be accountable for one's acts; responsible; behavior should be
defensible.
I don't know any teachers or school principals who reject the need for
accountability. What's tearing a great many of them up, and sending some to
early retirement, is deciding to whom they should be accountable. Official
policy demands one thing; their desire to do what's best for kids demands
something else.
Of course, most of those who're currently making education policy don't think
that's a problem. They're sure that their demands are identical with what's best
for kids, sure that everything important about educating can be measured and the
result summed up in a single number or letter grade, sure, therefore, that No
Child Left Behind's requirements for standardized testing, grade retention,
school grading, public shaming and so on are real reforms.
And they've been very successful at convincing the general public that they're
right, that their policies are the key to accountability. Those who oppose them
-- those who point to mountains of contrary research and firsthand experience
showing that the new policies are simplistic and will prove to be disastrously
counterproductive -- get written off as unwilling to be held unaccountable.
There are, however, an increasing number of professionals angry enough to take a
stand, and Nebraska's commissioner of education, Doug Christensen, is one of
them. Nebraska's schools have a good reputation, and he aims to maintain and
improve that reputation. What, then, should one think when he says, "I don't
give a damn what No Child Left Behind (NCLB) says. I think education is far too
complex to be reduced to a single score. . . . If it's bad for kids, we're not
going to do it."?
Is he refusing to be held accountable? Irresponsible? Self-serving? Or is he
seeing "accountability" as something owed to students rather than to politicians
whose views are too often skewed by political considerations?
Christensen doesn't think Nebraska's schools are exemplary. But neither does he
buy Washington's contention, echoed in most state capitols (with an eye on
federal money), that NCLB is the key to improvement. He thinks the real problem
is that schools really haven't changed much in the past hundred years and need
more flexibility to rethink what they're doing and why. He argues that the
curriculum lacks clarity, focus and coherence. He says schools -- particularly
those above the elementary level -- are far too big, aren't sufficiently
integrated with the communities they serve, and don't make adequate provision
for how kids differ from each other. He thinks student educational experience
doesn't flow smoothly from one level to the next, and believes research is a
better guide to reform than what often passes for common sense.
Think about Christensen's list of problems. Not a single item on it lies
primarily in the realm of teacher or student control and responsibility.
Everything he thinks is necessary to improve the quality of schooling requires a
loosening rather than a tightening of centralized, bureaucratic control.
Which means that the education-improvement monkey should be taken off the backs
of students and teachers and put where it belongs -- on the backs of legislators
in Washington and in state capitols. They've hung the "standards and
accountability" slogan in the wrong place, and milked it for political advantage
long enough.
Call or write those legislators. Tell them that Doug Christensen has it right,
that more and more of their constituents know it, and you're going to hold them
accountable.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
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