Ode to joy

Our first guest blogger, Tampa teacher and Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform activist John Perry, returns with a commentary about education accountability in this week's Teachers Corner. He doesn't like it. Post a comment of your own after reading. Perry generally tracks this blog and is likely to respond.

"If I asked you what one word you heard most often in recent discussions about education, what would that word be? Perhaps "joy," as in "the joy of learning?" That might be a logical answer, but perversely, it now sounds like bitter sarcasm coming from a teacher in the age of "accountability," the single obsession in education today. Joy isn't even on the radar screen.

I am so over accountability. By even starting with that term, we are letting the corporate agenda  control the debate. At the first meeting last week of the Educator Roundtable, Georgia State University education professor Dr. Deron Boyles said that all we talk about now in education is accountability. We used to talk about responsibility. How did this sudden shift happen? It didn't come from educators. Accountability is a business concept, like competition, also a foreign and destructive concept when applied to education. Public education is being hijacked by Corporate America and in my view, they've already won when we allow them to set the terms of the debate.

Here's my suggestion for accountability: ban that word, and all the other words and phrases used to perpetrate this corporate takeover. Educators, parents, and elected leaders have to stop letting the Business Roundtable  control the debate.

For example, I have two students who only speak a few words of English who were forced to take FCAT this year because they've been in the U.S. for a year. In the three hundred hours of ESOL courses teachers must take to teach such students, we're told it can take seven years for kids to become fluent in academic English. After one year, they're not even fluent in conversational English, yet they are forced to take FCAT with the rest of the students at their grade level.

So while businessmen and politicians pontificate about "accountability," what they really mean is that kids who can't read first grade English are forced to take a test that is challenging to fourth graders who are native speakers of English. Their scores count against the school's grade, and against me, of course. (Kind of hard to get "merit pay" based on those kinds of test scores, or bonuses based on school grades.) That's what they're really talking about when they talk about accountability - abuse of and discrimination against kids, teachers, and schools. Just ask that fourth grader with a mustache in the class next to mine. He spent three years in third grade because he didn't pass FCAT. He should be in sixth grade. What's the likelihood of him finishing school? It's a lot dimmer now, thanks to "accountability."

We shouldn't concede to this push for "accountability." We need to debunk accountability and get back to our responsibilities to our students."

Note: Perry offers a link to the Educator Roundtable's petition to dismantle NCLB. Click here if you are interested. If you'd like to be a guest blogger, submit your writings for consideration to solochek@sptimes.com.

Comments

[Paul A. Moore]

ac•count•a•bil•i•ty - Pronunciation: (u-koun"tu-bil'i-tē),—n. 1. the state of being accountable, liable, or answerable. 2. Educ.a policy of holding schools and teachers accountable for students' academic progress by linking such progress with funding for salaries, maintenance, etc.

A system of strict accountability for children reigns in Florida. They begin to answer to men with power under this system at the age of 9 or 10-years-old. No matter the circumstances of the child’s life—poverty, racism, neglect, abuse, malnutrition, the constant threat of violence—no excuse is accepted. Failure is always punished!

There was a little girl at Lillie C. Evans Elementary last year that met and far exceeded the state’s accountability demands. Sherdavia Jenkins was a top scorer on the FCAT and was granted permission to proceed to the fourth grade. While school was recessed for the summer though, the little girl was shot and killed playing with a doll on her front porch. The system of strict accountability failed to protect Sherdavia. That failure was not punished!

As they grow older, Florida’s children never escape the pressures of accountability unless they can afford private schooling. Teenagers are responsible for mastery of FCAT skills as a condition of high school graduation in the State of Florida. One young man, an aspiring lawyer and honor student at Miami Carol City High School, met and far exceeded the state’s demands but just days before the graduation ceremony Jeffrey Johnson, Jr. was gunned down. Jeffrey was buried in his cap and gown.

For Sherdavia and Jeffrey and a growing list of children and youth of color who have died violently in Miami-Dade and around the State of Florida, we the undersigned declare that the time has come to make accountability a two-way street.

We the undersigned appeal to you Gov. Charlie Crist. Our young people have dutifully faced up to the state’s measure of accountability—the FCAT. Yet today they stand abandoned and neglected in the shadow of violence and death. We are the classmates, the parents and the teachers of the fallen children and in their memory we pledge to begin building a boycott of the FCAT while we await a response to this crisis. You must use the great power of the governor’s office to make Florida’s schools and the communities around them “measurably” safer. You are accountable to us for it!

[Doug Tuthill]

John, thank-you for your thoughtful commentary.

I am unclear about whether you oppose accountability or how it’s currently being implemented in public education. I’m also unclear about your distinction between responsibility and accountability. When I tell students that a project is due May 1, they are responsible and accountable for meeting that deadline. If they turn in their work late, they receive negative consequences (i.e., a lower grade). So in my classroom responsibility and accountability are interdependent concepts.

The NCTE commentary you linked to caused me to wonder about the increasingly fuzzy distinction between public and private education. How do you distinguish between public and private education?

Thanks.

[Jim]

I am a Hillsborough County middle school math teacher. I can assure you that the FCAT DOES have an effect on the learning of the students. Teachers who teach math & reading teach every day-right up to the day the kids take the FCAT tests.

Teachers who teach history, geography, etc. make up their own tests at FCAT time. Even though there is a set curriculum, there is no proof that the required curriculum is actually being taught. In my school, those teachers are constantly having "fun Fridays", movie days, etc.

Yes, we are all supposed to be professionals. However, it is a fact that having "Big Brother" looking over our shoulder keeps us in step and working harder-like it or not.

Without accountability we have 18 yr. old high school graduates who can't read or write. Year after year these "professional" teachers moved these students through the system. We need to find ways to improve the FCAT, not eliminate it.

[IP Freely]

Well la de freaking da,
If you don't speak the language then get out of the country..
Take the FCAT and stop crying.