The Question of Accountability

I only have awareness of my immediate accountability. I am accountable only to students, parents and to a lesser degree, the department head. Any accountability I have to those higher up the ladder is indirect. Direct accountability to the individual student is reserved for those on the bottom of the chain: teachers, parents and students. Accountability to groups of students between twenty and 1500 is focused on administration and heads of departments. Board managers and policymakers in Toronto are accountable to larger groups.

I believe that it is impossible for educational accountablility to exist in any other way but a down-loaded chain of command. At the bottom are all the students, to whom all teachers are accountable. An empathetic teacher will naturally feel some responsibility for a student’s success or failure. Decades ago, imparting material effectively, answering the odd question, then reporting student achievement would be the extent of teacher accountability. It would then be up to the parents and students to ensure success. Accountability would be pushed down the chain. Now policies are in place that increase teacher accountability.

We are accountable to students through credit recovery progams. We are compelled through administration and our heads to share accountability with the student and parents. If a student repeats a course or decides to drop out, the checks and balances are in place to ensure that we have had shared accountability for that student’s educational choice.

Teachers can’t recommend that students be disciplined for behaviour or attendance by adminstration until adequate parental contact has been made. We must document each attempt at communication and we must make ourselves reasonably available to parents. We have a responsibility to communicate with the parents regularly – especially to parents of at-risk or identified students. Teacher accountability to student success is now shared with parents.

The head of department ensures that teachers are accountable to students. This responsibility has always been down-loaded to the teacher through curriculum workshops, documents and through subject leaders that guide. I am really only accountable to the head in that periodically I must report what I teach, what my marks are and which student has which text book. This type of organization allows for greater student success, but shifts accountabilty to teachers.

None of these policies are intrusive to me. I have complete faith in my present administration that all top-down policies from the board will be handled in a way that does not affect my job and the students. I am lucky – I have colleagues do not feel the same way about their administration. The increase in the paper trail of accountability is the one down side I have.

I don’t have faith, however, that the Ministry of Education will create policies that are in students’, parents’ or teachers’ best interests. The use and skewing of data to create crises is a skill that governments commonly have. When the vehicle [ever-changing stadardized literacy and numeracy tests] that creates imperfect data is also created by the government, a dangerous precedent is set.

According to the article, the accountability experience in Alberta is adversarial – a lot like the the history of educational accountability in the US: with cut-backs, there was a greater emphasis on outputs; standardized tests were mandated and the data from these incomplete student snapshots were used to inform citizens about the state of their education system – often for political leverage.

I learned from this article that the real need in Alberta is to create a climate of accountability that is shared and fair. The author [a member of the Alberta’s Teachers Association] created axes of accountablity which I found valuable. I can imagine a similar rubric that evaluates a system’s level of accountability. The options the author came up with were even-handed and fair. The government would be hard-pressed to refute these findings.

The focus of Lorna Earl’s article was on teachers’ direct accountability to student learning. Unlike the Alberta article, it is focused on what teachers can do to improve the situation.

She dissects teacher accountability – she even outlines the type of learning teachers need to ensure accountability. She plays to teachers’ beliefs that we are capable of effecting positive relationships between all levels of the educational hierarchy. The ball, she believes, is in our court. She outlines ways for teachers to effect improved accountability: forging partnerships with parents and students, being literate and up-to-date on all aspects of pedagogy, being empathetic with all members of the learning team.

Lorna Earl effectively argues against teachers who want immunity against accountability and argues for keeping teacher accountability. It is a powerful tool that teachers can use to effect positive change to education.