Student Accountability vs. Teacher Accountability

As adults, we see it pretty clearly.  We get it.  Kids need to value their education.  They need to take responsibility for it.  They need to be held accountable for their actions when they create big problems that get in the way of other kids getting to learn.

We get it because we as adults can see the value of owning your own education.  The flip side of that is people who aren't adults just don't always see it.

 An impassioned speaker at September's Board Meeting pointed out that in all the debate about teacher accountability, discussion about student accountability was being lost.  (You can see the Board Meeting and all of the speakers at this link.   The speaker reminded the audience that the famous 1989 movie "Lean on Me" was based on a true story, and that the story had at its heart student accountability.  So why isn't student accountability being talked about more today?

That's a good question.  I suspect it's not due to a lack of desire for it.  I think it's because it's hard to tackle from a policy standpoint. 

You can kick a kid out of school for certain felonies.  But you can’t kick a kid out of school for being a bad student.  In 2012, the law doesn’t let you.

(Well... you can't if you are a public school; you can if you are a charter school or private school.  But that's a discussion for a different post!)

Bottom line, we want to educate our kids.  We want them to succeed.  We try to craft our laws to reflect that.  We are still working out how to do that.


The National law and the State law require that schools graduate a high percentage of students.  At the same time, the law doesn’t want schools giving valueless diplomas.  The graduation can only happen when the student has mastered a wide variety of academic knowledge and skills.  Testing is how we determine that.  It's far from a perfect measure.  It's all we have today.

We the public really want the law to work.  We don’t want to see kids flunk out or drop out or be kicked out.  We care about our kids.  We also know that those who drop out of school or get kicked out usually end up in crime or on the streets.  That's bad for everyone.

The reason urban superintendents, principals and other administrators go from school to school, from district to district, and don't stay long in one place is that nobody has figured out how to meet the high standard of the law for every student.  We’ve had almost thirty years of trying to make administrators get us there.  They've taken us part of the way, but they can't get us all the way.

So, now the pressure is on the teachers.

It's either pressure on the teachers, the parents, or the students.  Parents can and should be held accountable, but we want all kids educated, even the ones who's parents never step foot on campus.  (Some of those parents were the ones who dropped out twenty years ago.  Break the cycle or continue it?)  So, between teachers and students... Which is easier to hold accountable - the adults who understand the how much rides on education, or the kids who don't?

If you want to kick kids out of school, you raise your dropout rate and risk running afoul of the law.  If you don’t keep your dropout rates low - or at least keep making progress - the school may have to fire everyone in it and re-staff.  Plus, the kids you kick out will probably end up in jail, homeless or on drugs – or all of that.

If you keep problem kids in school, you can put them in a special, personalized program.  Behavior and academic problems are sometimes symptoms of deeper issues.  DISD use to have more special programs for problem students. 

Very sadly, some of those excellent programs were shut down in the huge budget cutback of 2011.  There were many reasons for it, all of them financial and legal.  The State massively cut funding that was used for some of the programs, the general school budgets were cut, and there was a crack down on DISD to better prove equal funding between Title I schools in order to retain Federal funds. 

Dallas spends about $9,250 per student per year.  (It use to be over $11,000.)  The cost of maintaining some of the special programs for problem students exceeded $20,000 per student per year.  That’s why they got cut, even though they worked.

No more money is coming down the pike.  Administrators will keep trying new things, but years later. trickle-down change is still slow.  Teachers are getting the pressure to fix the system because others have tried and failed.  Tying a teacher’s evaluation to the students’ test scores is the only way that government knows how to do that.  Measuring test scores is all the government knows how to do in order to determine if the diploma a student is earning is worth the title.

For that matter, everything else IS measured in test scores.   Superintendent Myles’ success will be measured by test results.  The Board of Trustees’ success is always measured by test results.  The new Executive Directors will be measured by test results. Even principals will be measured by test results, if rumors about the new principal evaluation system pan out.    

Put yourself in their shoes.  From the point of view of the Administration, everyone else is being measured by student test results – why should the teachers, the ones who teach the students, be exempt?

Maybe teachers will be the ones to finally find a better way to measure student success.  I hope so! Otherwise, we're stuck with test scores.