VPerspective
Making accountability count
Jan 31, 2008 3:37 PM
Speech! Aminda Gentile (right), UFT vice president and Teacher Center director, receives a plaque for her leadership and support to the master’s degree program in speech language pathology at Western Kentucky University. The plaque was from graduates of the UFT Teacher Center Speech Program at a ceremony on Jan. 17. Jill McCabe of PS 196 in the Bronx makes the presentation. A complete report on the graduation will appear in the Feb. 14 issue of the New York Teacher.
Over the Christmas vacation I took some time off to dip into a new translation of one of my favorite books, “Don Quixote,” a classic that always gets me thinking about life in new and surprising ways. For example, prior to what he knows will be another dangerous quest, the ever pragmatic squire Sancho Panza advises his brave but often foolish mentor, “It’s necessary to go through life as if you’re on probation.”
Think about it. We are constantly judged, constantly tested and not only in standardized ways. Either we measure up or we don’t. This led me to think of the whole concept of accountability and being held accountable.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, when running for office in 2000, said voters would be able to hold him accountable for the state of the city’s schools at the next election in 2004. He won a second time; there are term limits, so what does accountability for the mayor mean now?
Chancellor Joel Klein links school accountability to performance, to a single letter grade based on a complex, dubious standard. Schools that get an A get money and resources, those that get an F get closed. That’s holding schools accountable, in a manner of speaking.
However, there is also systemic accountability for the performance of the schools. Does the system work toward lowering class size, creating safe and secure schools, providing a real mentoring program for our newest teachers and meeting the needs of special groups of students — conditions that should be in place so that all schools have an opportunity to succeed?
In December we saw the spectacle of several hundred angry parents chasing the department’s chief accountability officer from the hallowed chambers of New York’s City Hall into the Tweed Courthouse. As a demonstration of accountability it may have garnered headlines but there needs to be something more measurable.
But this all brings me back to the folks in the schools who are truly going through their professional lives as if on constant probation. Teachers are lectured over and over that their individual worth as a teacher — and if many ideologues and non-educators get their way, their individual pay checks — are accountable to the scores of their students on a single math and English test. I and many others have written about the misuse of standardized tests and the concomitant mania for testing, how it has harmed students, instructionally and emotionally, and turned schools into testing factories that produce a single letter as their product.
Sure it’s true we’re always on probation of sorts; we’re being judged and we’re judging, fairly and unfairly, using fair and unfair measures. But I don’t think any teacher would say, “Don’t hold me accountable.”
I’m not sure myself what a complete system of accountability should look like, though I do have my ideas and I’m sure that many of you do, too. What do you think accountability means? What measures should it include and how should we hold ourselves, our colleagues, our schools and the entire New York City public school system accountable for doing what we as a society expect of them?
I’d like to hear your thoughts on the subject, because we know for sure that others with more foolish and often dangerous ideas are putting us on probation, too.
