Teachers should be held accountable for student performance

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Holding a teacher solely accountable for student's success is like saying one person is solely accountable for their friendship with other person.

When I was in school students knew who were good and bad teachers, although we never communicated that our parents.

Teaching is similar to alot professions where performance is not easily obtainable. Because of our always be fair culture we must then try to find some magical item that can be quantified in order to measure performance. Plus, most superiors are poor at honestly addressing employee evaluations.

NOPE. Wrong. The teacher has a responsibility to do their part, but they cannot stuff knowledge or skills into someone's head. That person - the student - has to put some effort into the process. Each has a part to play, putting an effort out in the other's direction, one transmitting and the other receiving. Receiving in the process of learning is not passive.

A good teacher will do his/her best to present material in multiple ways so that students of varying levels and kinds of ability have the same chance to catch on. They'll also be on the lookout for anyone who is struggling, to be given some individual help.

The problem is parents, it used to be if a teacher called a kid's parents, the parents would back the teacher, now they back up their kid, even to the point of bringing lawyers to parent teacher conferences (yes that actually happened).

Quoted because it bears repeating. My only tiny quibble is I think it is actually a good idea to hold teachers accountable through relative performance- but only relative to the student's prior performance, not relative to the other students. What I mean is, a teacher must not let a student freeze in place. If a student is failing to make progress in a subject, it should not be acceptable to simply give the student a failing grade and let that be the end of it. There needs to be an intervention- which of course is expensive since it will require the hiring of teacher's aids or more teachers. Helping a failing student is labor intensive and labor is expensive, as you noted.

When I was a kid I routinely failed math. It's not because I didn't want to learn. I wanted to learn very much so that certain things would make sense to me. It certainly wasn't because I was "bad" as Joker would have it. Sending me to military school would simply mean I got D's in math there instead of in public school. I asked my parents for help but all they could do was show how they personally solved math problems. I asked the teachers for help but they just gave hurried repeats after class of the same explanation they had given in class, apparently thinking that I had missed the explanation because I was daydreaming.

Kids who couldn't read were given remedial help because dyslexia existed as a concept back then. But dyscalcula didn't. Funded extra help was given to those who had mental retardation (which I suppose was ruled out based on how well I read) or difficulty reading. I wish the teachers or the school system at large had been held accountable for finding a way to teach me at least some math, as they did with kids who couldn't read, rather than simply failing me over and over.

An interesting notion, Janissy. But even on an issue of student performance relative to the student's past performance, there is still a notional limit. What's the incentive to teach the straight A student?

I can do equations in my head, I can value a company based on financial statements in my head, I came close to failing math throughout my educational "career". Even I can't explain that.

Meh, give the teachers union (even moreso than invidual teachers) a good chunk of accountability for results. That could turn education around in the US almost overnight.

This point is brought up by parents of gifted students who fear (reasonably) that their children (in the U.S.) are getting short-changed by the U.S. focus on passing standardized tests. Their children pass those just fine and languish at the top of the class. Thus I don't think the accountability should fall exclusively on the teachers but should be shared equally by the school system. There should be resources (expensive, I know) not just for kids who are failing, but for kids who are stagnating at the top.

The teacher should be able to refer those kids either to gifted programs (which should exist) or to extra-curricular programs (which also should exist) or get the help of teacher's aids (which should exist). It may be possible for a single teacher to both remediate the failing student and enrich the effortlessly A student who is stagnating but I doubt it. In order for both extremes to get what they need, people beyond the classroom teacher will need to be called in (expensive to hire, but this is needed).

Ironically, I actually was at both extremes. I utterly failed to grasp most concepts in math (I never did get long division and faked it with extensive subtraction) and also may have been at or near the top of the class in reading ability. A succession of teachers noticed this and simply commented on it to the effect that since I could read so well, I logically also ought to be able to do math well and should simply try harder. They neither remediated my math nor gave me anything extra beyond a series of A's for my English class work.

The person who gave me something extra was a middle school librarian. She noticed a pattern in what I checked out and started referring me to specific books and then when I had exhausted the school library she gave me a written list of books I should check out from the public library. Thus I did not stagnate. This is why I think that for students at both ends of the grade curve, extra teaching hands will be needed. Giving students appropriate (rather than perfunctory) help or enrichment is probably more than a teacher with 30+ students can do.

So in a perfect school system, the accountability of teachers for both ends of the spectrum would often consist of noticing who needs what and giving them the proper referrals- and the labor costs of those referrals would be the accountability of the school system.

Contrast with:



Personally, I find it curious that you concede that some unionized/tenured teachers have it a bit easier than they want you to believe, only to follow it with a lamentation about the plight of the overworked, underpaid and underappreciated education professional whilst blaming it all on the archetypical pig-headed rightists to boot. The truth of the matter is that some teachers aren't struggling financially in some locales as much as they are in others, ergo we can't really make generalizations but rather must take it on a case-by-case basis. Also, I find it curious how you speak of "a well-educated work force" in the context of the American education system which closely follows the Prussian model that was never noted for producing crtitical thinkers.

Suffice to say, laying the blame entirely on the doorstep of the teachers or the students is definitely not going to solve our problems, and the same can be said for resorting to knee-jerk solutions like cutting educational funding where it's already strapped or throwing generous amounts of money at it in the hopes it will automatically make it "better." As I've told Joker, when we shift the focus away from rote learning and "teaching to the test" which I'm sure you'll agree create perverse incentives, then we can get to the root of the problem.

There is no inconsistency CoMF.

Because teachers have insisted on being treated as salaried, unionized workers, they have foregone the ability to govern their own profession and build fences around their working conditions. Those issues have become collective bargaining issues which always fall away to the larger issue of salaries and benefits.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the negotiating table, managers of the education service are stuck in the middle, with increasing demand for services on one side, and ever decreasing resources on the other. Even when class size limits are the subject of collective agreements or education laws, they are routinely ignored. Public schools have no choice--they must enrol all eligible students and they must provide classroom space for them.

This isn't about how many dollars are in teachers pockets, it's about how many teachers there are in a give school to cope with the demand for services. It's about how many classrooms there are in schools to accommodate students. Just throwing money at the problem won't help, to be sure. But when school districts are starved of resources, they are compelled to cut optional things--like small classrooms, extra counsellors and special needs teachers, arts and music education, and streaming--in favour of delivering the services that they are legally compelled to provide, in ever larger, more crowded classrooms, in which one teacher must teach the entire of spectrum of students assembled there.

I live in the UK. I am not sure how different it is to the US. Take an example I know about. I had a friend who was a good, even tempered, well qualified teacher. There was one difficult pupil who drove her to distraction and my friend finally lost her temper with that pupil. The parents complained and my friend ended up having to apologise to the pupil. Now don't you think it rather obvious why teachers have difficulty controlling classes these days.

When you put things into that context, I'd have to agree that there's no inconsistency.



You say all this, and yet the student to teacher ratio in, say, New York City is not necessarily the same as the student to teacher ratio in Schenectady. Again, it's something that needs to be evaluated and addressed on a case-by-case basis rather than attempting to apply a blanket solution nationwide.

This is but one example, but the school in my locale has such a budget surplus that they've resorted to spending their funding on frivolous things, and I dare say that the teachers are pampered in the context of pay, benefits, and work load/teacher to student ratio when compared to others in their field working in other areas. Now, we can blame this on the unionized/tenured system for this if we wish, but frankly, I'm a little indignant over the fact that people who live in my area with a comparable or, in some cases, better education have to settle for jobs that pay from less than half to a third of what these teachers are making and are working twice as hard for it. When these teachers have to choose between paying their rent/mortgage, paying their student loans, paying their utilities, or putting food on the table, then maybe I'll be inclined to feel more sympathy for them. As it stands, I regard them as little more than a pack of spoiled brats, and their true colors become painfully apparent every time their collective bargaining agreement is up for renewal.

Anyway, I'm not trying to demonize all teachers. I do know that some really do struggle because of the circumstances you've pointed out. The point I am trying to make is that I do not believe that all teachers everywhere in the United States have a patent on suffering, and I get really irritated when I perceive that someone is implying such.