I am a third-year high school English teacher at a decent school in North Carolina. I very much agree that lousy teachers hide behind tenure and are not held as accountable as they ought to be held; as a nontenured teacher who works for hours after school and on weekends, I admit that I resent those who are sitting on their tenure and not working hard for their students.

That said, the idea that high school teachers should be held accountable for students' progress is a very slippery slope. By the time I ever meet these students in 10th grade, they have had 10 years to NOT learn what they should know. They come from bad homes, they have had bad teachers. My 10th graders do not know what a noun is. This very morning, they all sincerely argued that when you write a letter, you don't have to use paragraphs! Although my course is a "college prep" course, they are wildly unprepared for college and I cannot possibly hope to improve their lives or their paths in the semester that they will be in my classroom.

Teachers are faced with an overwhelming level of apathy from students. Although I recognize and understand that part of my job as a teacher is to break through the apathy and engage students, they're so trained already that I will never have a fair chance. Should my students' low scores reflect poorly on me and put my pay and my job in jeopardy? We're all about creating more accountability in this country and particularly in the field of education, but the accountability always seems to be at the expense of teachers whereas students are never TRULY held accountable anymore. The accountability question seems more to be asking teachers "Did you teach this?" rather than asking students "Was this the day you went to sleep? Was this the day you refused to do your assigned reading homework? Was this the day that you text messaged instead of took notes? Was this the day that you disrupted class and had to have your seat moved because you could not even quietly watch a 20-minute film?"

I hope I am not alone in this feeling. I hope that other teachers can agree with me.

the answer is to measure teachers such as yourself by the students' improvement relative to the improvement shown by students in other teachers' classes. You can't affect where the students start out but you should be held accountable for their improvement (or lack thereof).

Also, the ultimate and most effective form of accountability would be school choice. Forget test scores--let parents be the ultimate judges of their kids' educations. If the teachers in a public school are terrible--let them take their kids elsewhere.

The one thing that would increase performance is to return discipline to the classroom and give teachers the power they need to do their jobs. It doesn't matter how good the teacher is if he/she can't discipline, remove or flunk a disruptive or lazy student. Most of the stuff taught in school isn't that interesting. I'm not sure how this myth got started, but there is no way a teacher can make listening to a teacher talk about English Literature more fun than acting up in class, or make studying for tests more fun than hanging out with friends. Schoolwork is work. If you can act up without being punished and won't fail if you don't study, then exactly why would the average student listen in class or study?

I went to a private school where the tuition was half of what the city was paying to educate students in a failing public school. Many of my teachers wouldn't have lasted a week in public school, but they had the administration's backing and us students knew that acting up in class would result in some serious and unpleasant consequences. I also knew that failing in my schoolwork meant falling into the lower track with the meaner students. As a result, I got an excellent education at the hands of some poor teachers, simply because I was allowed to learn for the first time.

I agree with you, CMS. Discipline is a difficult issue at my school. Unless the student openly curses you out, you're supposed to contact the student's parents about behavioral issues and work on the student from that front. But the students who create discipline problems are the ones whose parents are uninterested and uninvolved and usually have biases against education and teachers that they carry with them from their own school experiences.

Where I agree you with you even more, CMS, is in your remark about making learning interesting. Education as an institution is focused so much on "making learn fun." But as you rightly point out, there is a point where education is work. And you do just have to listen some days to teachers lecture and you do need to take notes. And you do need to read the book for yourself so you can understand class discussions. Etc. But this brand of teaching has been really devalued and downright looked-down-upon especially in the past few years. The message that this sends our students about how the real world functions is contradictory to the way that, well, the real world functions. If they expect that attending meetings is going to be entertaining and fun, and if they expect that everything they do at work all day is going to be "engaging" then they are living under a heavy delusion. Students do need to learn to be bored and how to handle themselves under those circumstances, and they need to feel harsh consequences if they fail to do so.

I'd like to return to zbird's points about accountability and school choice: zbird argues that student progress can be monitored by comparing their progress in comparison to student progress in other classes, but surely that's a failure of the system -- more specifically, it's a perversion of the system to accommodate political agendas that want so badly to show growth where no growth exists. We should expect all 10th graders to know what direct objects are, for example, or how to write a persuasive paper with a thesis statement. We should be able to have clearly defined standards for each grade that all graduates of that grade can meet or exceed. To say that progress in comparison to other classes is an answer is, well, not a good answer at all. Just because they may make more progress with me than with other teachers does not mean that they have necessarily mastered the elementary concepts that they should have mastered YEARS AGO. I learned nouns in second grade. I remember it clearly. Now, nearly 20 years later, they come to me in 10th grade and don't know what nouns are. Why is it reasonable to measure "growth" or "progress" instead of attaining clearly-defined objectives?

As far as school choice, I think the problem is the same at all public schools in this area. If parents want to send their students to another school, there are no private schools in the area that would be accessible even if they were given school vouchers to pay for them. Giving parents school choice also assumes that one school is altogether better than another, a fact which no parent can truly know and, even more importantly, a fact which may change the year after they send their child there.

Ultimately, the accountability question should be geared more towards students. Even the "bad teachers" (and I'm not defending them) are teaching the material. The question is whether or not students are expected to accept the instruction. That's a question that we are not asking as a country anymore.

Ramblingly,
Josh

'We're all about creating more accountability in this country and particularly in the field of education, but the accountability always seems to be at the expense of teachers whereas students are never TRULY held accountable anymore.'

that is a damn good point. perhaps we should start leaving some of the ungrateful miscreants behind. teach them if they want to be taught. short of drilling holes in their thick heads, there is nothing you can do with some of them except train them on the proper use of a mop and bucket.

Are you serious CMS? You know, for a fact, that your private school cost half of the public school? The last I heard, it costs your average public school about 6K to educate a student for one year. So, you paid only 3K (or it's equivalent in inflationary terms) per year? I'd like to see how that ended up making money.

Nugget, I sympathize. I, too, am a teacher and it is nearly impossible to overcome years of previous bad teachers not to mention poor discipline, anti-intellectual attitudes from parents, peers and the media and downright apathy from the students. There is a great deal of disenfranchisement with the system as a whole and I believe one solution is to, within our own little worlds, change the way we teach. We can't be expected to make up for all the shortcomings of every teacher or adult that child has come into contact with (as zbird would have us do; you assume, wrongly, every child starts from the same place and is subject to all of the same conditions. This is not a controlled, reproducible science experiment! These are real people in the real world in real time.)

Keep at it, be the change you want to see. You can only control you and what you do.

Isn't a big part of why your students were so dismally unprepared is that they had been taught by 10 years worth of teachers who also had no accountability for their progress and a school system which just passed them along through social promotion in order to make them someone else's (in this case, partly your) problem? Not to mention a policy-making structure above that which has been debating on and on about what to do about schools, but has very rarely done much in all those years.

Maybe there needs to be some sort of a phasing-in of some of the accountability standards as students who begin instruction in such an environment progress through the system.

If nothing else, it seems apparent that the social promotion/self-esteem first philosophy is failing the students it was supposed to help (unless the goal is to instill in them that they should be proud to be illiterate and unable to add or subtract 2 or 3 digit numbers).

Wow, I can't believe how many words have been put into my mouth that I never said. I never claimed that evaluating students' progress vs. students in other classes was anything more than a fair way to measure a teacher's performance. I completely agree with Josh that students should be expected to meet absolute (rather than relative) standards--but that's a separate issue.

As for school choice: Josh mentions that there are no private school options where he lives. But if parents had access to vouchers, private citizens would inevitably establish new schools to attract students with vouchers, especially if the vouchers.

Josh also states that parents cannot ultimately know if one school is better than another. That's ridiculous--the difference between effective private schools and failing urban public can be night or day. I guess at a philosophical level, nothing can be "known" 100%, and yes, a good school can become bad. But I trust parents to have their kids' best interest at heart more than I trust the government.

Your logic basically says that adults are incapable of making informed decisions about what they purchase, and that the government should therefore make those decisions for them. Coke or Pepsi? let the government decide which is better. Want to go to Disneyworld? Sorry--government says you have to go to the Grand Canyon this year. We would never allow such totalitarian control over most decisions in our lives, but when it comes to education we let the government decide what's best.

I know a bunch of teachers. There is a huge elephant in this room that no one wants to acknowledge and that is the incredibly crappy quality of school administrators. many of the administrators I know would survive about one month as managers in the private sector and get tossed out on their ears.

Administrators can easily make teachers' lives pure hell, and play funding games to "encourage" compliance with whatever stupid ideas they come up with.

The administrators are the ones getting the really big bucks, and are too often undeserving of them.

At my daughter's school, students take an assessment test at the beginning of the school year - this establishes a baseline and also serves to indicate areas that need extra teaching. Goals are then set based on the combined results of the assessments. Mid-year, a new assessment is given to measure progress and to determine any new areas for extra instruction. Finally, at the end of the year, a final assessment is given.

Seems like a pretty concrete method to measure teaching progress.

Ultimately, the accountability question should be geared more towards students. Even the "bad teachers" (and I'm not defending them) are teaching the material. The question is whether or not students are expected to accept the instruction. That's a question that we are not asking as a country anymore.

Josh, many states have “exit” exams that students must pass before they can get a high school diploma. And if a student abnegates his responsibility to learn what you teach him, then surely you can fail him in your course.

Having said that, I must say, as a former English teacher, that I was surprised to read that you feel teaching nouns (grammar) to 10th graders is necessary. Why not teach them to write instead? Elsewhere, you say that sometimes it is necessary for a teacher to lecture and for students to sit there and take notes. While that may be true in college, I don’t think it’s true for 10th graders. I can’t think of a single day when I lectured to my 10th graders.

This very morning, they all sincerely argued that when you write a letter, you don't have to use paragraphs!

Rather than do battle with them over how they want to write personal letters, just mention the difference between personal writing (letters) and public writing (reports for jobs, essays for high school and college). And tell them you will focus on public writing.

Was this the day that you disrupted class and had to have your seat moved because you could not even quietly watch a 20-minute film?

Before the film starts, give them a ditto with questions that can be answered by watching the film. Tell them they will have to answer the questions after the film is over before the class discussion. Be sure to grade the ditto so students realized the importance of paying attention to films.

We should expect all 10th graders to know what direct objects are, for example, or how to write a persuasive paper with a thesis statement.

You said earlier that students need to understand how the real world functions. In the real world, folks don’t need to know what direct objects are.

However, you can give them assignments that show them that writing a persuasive paper is important in the real world. Example ­­ -- write a persuasive paper to your boss giving reasons why you should get a raise or write a persuasive paper to ou can give them assignments that show them that writing a persuasive paper is important in the real world. Example ­­ -- write a persuasive paper to your boss giving reasons why you should get a raise or write a persuasive paper to your parents giving reasons why you should be allowed to _____.

As for the need for thesis statements, give the class two paragraphs or essays, one of which has a straightforward thesis statement, one of which does not. Ask them which is the more effective paper and why.