Education :Lack of Accountabilty For Students ,Parents A Weakness Of The system

We were having a parade for Veteran's Day at the school where I taught. Students invited grandparents, friends and neighbors who were veterans to join in our festivities. One of my second-grade students came to me and asked, "Can we ride in the parade with our vegetarian?" I smiled as I thought about the laughs I would get when I told this story to my colleagues. I've entertained many of my family members by telling them about humorous things my students would say and do, but those stories have come to an end for me. I have left the teaching profession and have now joined the information technology profession.

Many people have asked me why I left my teaching career. I always preface my response by stating: I love teaching and truly enjoyed working with my principal and colleagues. I often had dinner with them and embarked on road trips with some. I didn't feel defeated. My students' test scores were among the highest in the school. I love kids and have been very successful in reaching even the most "difficult" kids.

Many people are in a continual search for a job where they enjoy the company of their boss and colleagues. So why would I want to leave a profession that I enjoyed and in which I am successful?

Of course, there are all the usual stresses of being a teacher: limited bathroom breaks, a small window of time to make doctor's appointments and other personal phone calls, grading papers during every break and throughout the weekends and rushing through 25-minute lunch breaks with your students while listening to them tell you stories about their new puppy.

I was, however, warned of these stresses before I accepted my teaching position. There were many other variables that caused me, like many other teachers, to switch careers.

Teachers are now being evaluated on how many of their students pass the PACT. Teachers are not being measured on their true success with a child. A boy moved into our district from out of state, and he was placed in my second-grade classroom. I quickly learned that he struggled in math, could not write and even struggled writing his own name. His confidence was almost non-existent when it came to schoolwork. By the end of the year, he was excelling in math and was writing complete sentences and short stories.

I had brought him leaps and bounds in his performance, but he was still just below average in standardized test scores. From an evaluation standpoint, I was unsuccessful with this student because he was not average or above.

There are many people who are (or should be) involved in the education of a child. When a child is successful, educators are quick to praise everyone involved, especially the parents. But when a child is struggling in school, the blame seems to focus on the teacher alone.

A month into the school year, a mother storms into a fourth-grade classroom, slams a dictionary onto a table and exclaims, "Have you not taught my child how to use this yet?" Her child had been given a homework assignment that involved using guide words in the dictionary and apparently was struggling through the assignment.

The blame was immediately directed at the teacher. This is a skill that should have been mastered before coming into fourth-grade, but more importantly, the parent should take some responsibility for assisting her child with homework.

If the parent doesn't understand the assignment, a better approach would be to meet the teacher after school and say, "My child is having a hard time with this assignment. Could you show me how to help my child

Not only would that teacher help the parent, the teacher would probably offer many other ways to help that child in and out of school.

Although a child's education should be a joint effort involving the teacher, parents, administration and the student, the teacher is ultimately held responsible.

The teacher is left to feel "caught in the middle". The parent complains about their child's struggles, the child senses their parents' frustrations and gives up, and the administration continually tells the teacher to "find a way" to raise this child's test scores.

The Accountability Act of 1998 requires academic assistance plans that are now being used to aid in the success of a student's performance. The teacher puts together a contract for the teacher, the parent and the student. Each person signs the plan with the understanding that each person involved needs to complete certain tasks in order for the student to succeed. The parent and student portion of the plan includes tasks that assure homework assignments are complete, the student arrives to school on time, is prepared and reads with someone every day.

When PACT scores are returned and the student is still below basic, the teacher is considered the failure. Even though that student arrived late to school on many occasions, never had a pencil or paper and homework assignments were incomplete or missing altogether, the parent and the student were never held responsible for their actions.

As a teacher, you know what your salary will be for the remainder of your career. The only way for me to increase that salary was to pay for a master's and doctorate degrees.

In my new career, I am starting at the "bottom of the ladder" and making the same salary as a teacher with 6 years of experience. In addition, my new career is paying for furthering my knowledge, and there is no limit to my salary potential.

After being in the business/computer world for several months now, I have noticed something very important. When you are given a task to complete, for the most part, it's "doable". You may get frustrated or you may run into setbacks, but it's a task that can be accomplished with some effort.

In teaching, your task is to make every student average or above, no matter what.

I was having a conference with a mother about her daughter's inability to focus in the classroom and her failure to turn in homework.

With tears in her eyes, she told me that she just discovered something that may be affecting her daughter's performance. When the mother would leave to go to her third-shift job, her husband would take their daughter with him as he went out drinking and playing poker.

She suspected that he was doing drugs during these nightly escapades as well. The child was not getting in the bed until late at night or early in the morning.

How can a teacher compete with that? These factors are never considered when a teacher's or school's test scores are made public.

Five years ago, if you asked a teacher why they loved teaching, they would probably respond by saying, "I can't explain that feeling I get when I see the light come on in a child's eyes when they learn something new."

With the new high-intensity regimen that teaching requires today, you don't have the time to see that light.

The PACT requires students to master skills that are extremely detailed and advanced. The PACT was modeled after a test in Virginia that they quickly abandoned because the standards were set too high.

If a teacher wants his or her students to be successful on the PACT, he or she must fill each day with an intense amount of lessons that require high levels of thinking.

There is less time to spend working with individual children to help them master these skills. The only way for that to be accomplished is to spend extra time before and/or after school, and that's not always an option for the student or the teacher. Achievement of this nature can only be obtained with the help and full cooperation of parents.

When you put all of these factors together, you basically take away the joy of teaching. You lose the opportunity to "see the light come on" in a child's eyes.

Teachers want their students to feel successful, but a teacher is never given the chance to feel successful.

To be a teacher, you must put your entire heart into your job. Who wants to commit every waking hour to something and never feel success?

When I was being interviewed for my current job, I was asked why I wanted to leave teaching. Knowing I didn't have time to outline all the reasons, I simply said, "The teaching profession has changed dramatically, and these changes have taken the joy out of it.

I am thankful I had an opportunity to move into another career I enjoy. I will have to save my love of teaching for my future children.

Lisa Richards is a former teacher who currently is an information technology professional at NewSouth Communications.

There is no question that parents play a major role in the education of children. In the book The Bell Curve which was roundly derided as racist (which it was not) the authors atate that 60% of IQ is inherited and 40% is acquired. The highest IQs belong to Eastern European jews and Orientals do extremely well. One explanation, besides genetics, is that the parents (especially mothers) spend inordinate amounts of time with the education of the children in these societies and that education is consided a major goal and end in itself. However, not all of us are so blessed to have such a support structure and then the teachers must assume the burdens. Fair? You judge. However, the teaching profession must give students the opportunity to learn by teaching rigorous curricula and not filling their minds solely with "social responsibility" and "self esteem." These so called "courses" are easy but do not teach anything but allow people to determine their own parameters of success. When they enter the cruel real world, they are helpless.

Great paper. The hidden factor is parent involvement. My two sons were reading before starting school. The missing class in high school is Parenting. If young parents knew how they could help their children the teachers would be able to teach more. Now my grandchildren are excelling. Wesley at five just started kindergarten with the ability to read phonetically and to add three columns, with carry overs. His mother taught him every day. All summer she gave the two older boys (7 & 5) ten spelling words at their level, and ten simple math problems. When driving she plays word and number games with them. Seeing their excitement even the two year old wants to participate in his own way. Wesley, the five year old, is a space nut and knows the names and can identify all the planets and has met Astronaut John Glenn. He has a Spanish speaking friend at school and without any prodding has learned from him to count in Spanish. The Kindergarten teacher had all the new students to count in front of the class to see where they were. When Wesley got to 900 she stopped him. he teacher now has him reading aloud to a group of kids who can read a little. The trouble is that most parents wait for the school to do what they should have been doing before school age. Again.... a course in Parenting is the greatest need in schools.

I like to propose a little thought experiment:

The Department of Education is "reformed". The new rules are:

(1) Parents' tax refunds are directly proportional to their childrens' scores on a standardized, nationwide test of basic competence (3 R's).

(2) Teachers' salaries are directly proportional to the average score of their students on the same test.

(3) The top salary of a teacher is equal to the minimum salary made by any NBA basketball player.

(4) No more mandatory schooling. School's out.

(5) But at age 18, everyone takes the SAT test. No exceptions. And anyone scoring less than "X" will be publically flogged (televised, too).

(6) The teachers' union is outlawed, and anyone now a member is registered like a sex offender, and enjoined from ever having contact with impressionable children again.

(7) No "teaching certificate" is needed. Results are all that matter. If a teacher's students consistently score below some minimum on the annual test, he or she is fired with no right of appeal.

This is a thought experiment. I am not actually proposing that students be publicly flogged. However, does anyone doubt that these measures would improve the learning of children?

If they would, there are surely measures less draconian which will do almost as much. Notice that several of these ideas are meant to elevate accountability. In engineering, the term is 'negative feedback', a self-correcting feature.

Think about it.

--Boris

We were told that if over a certain percentage of our students failed, WE would be held responsible. We were also told that if our students were absent more than a certain number of days, they should be failing, or we probably weren't covering enough material in class, if they could miss that much and still pass.

Of course, the number of kids who have been absent too much isn't factored into the number of "excessive" failures we might have. Neither is the number of children who have been socially promoted up to high school without being able to read, write coherent sentences, or do basic math.

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