Teachers Accountability In The United States

Teachers shape the minds of students to realize what their purpose is in life. Lately, because of certain educational reforms, it has been hard for teachers to say what they need to say. “In 40-plus states, the math and English guidelines determine the knowledge students have to master by the end of each grade, what they’ll be tested on this year, and in many cases, how teachers and principals will be rated at their jobs once those test scores are released” (Strauss). Most educational reforms are adopting standardized testing and should be reconsidered. Statistics even show that since we have taken part in reforms like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core State Standards math and reading are declining. These standards tell teachers what to teach and what the students should know by the end of the school year. The reforms also evaluate teacher performance by how well the students learn the information. Some people believe educational reforms should not be telling teachers how to teach their students, and others believe that the reforms are absolutely fine the way they are. However the truth is educational reforms are yet to be perfected.

I critically analyzed one of Diane’s Ravitch’s chapter Teacher’s Accountability for the course EDUC 680. As I described earlier that according to DeMarrais and LeCompte (1998), schools and teachers are responsible for reproducing the stratification of social classes and so we should consider having a curriculum to meet the needs of the disadvantages students and fill in the gaps of the differential knowledge between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Similarly, the neoliberalist (Apple, 2004) claims that teachers and schools should be held accountable based on standardized tests scores of the students. In both the situations, the teachers and schools should be responsible to mitigate the differences in their knowledge formation and reduce the test scores differences between the advantages and disadvantages groups based on the premises that

Many people believe that student test scores is the most efficient way to measure a teacher's effectiveness in the classroom. “Many policy makers have recently come

Currently, teacher evaluation is a hot button topic of education discussions relating to policy reform. There is an agreement that something more needs to be done in order for teacher evaluations to improve the quality of teaching. In almost every state of the country, there has been several changes made to the evaluation process over several periods of time, however, the changes have not quite been perfected in order to be looked at as extremely beneficial to teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2014). However, there needs to be more changes made in order for the evaluation process to truly improve the quality of teaching. Specifically, the United States has reached a critical moment where making the

1-IDEA and NCLB laws are so beneficial to assist students with special needs improving the quality of the child’s life. The main effects and implementations in IDEA for children with disabilities are: Educational accountability, accessing in the general education curriculum, and involving family. Educational accountability is a process to collect information about the kid: How many kids with/without disabilities, how to develop IEP? Where do these kids receive services and what services they should get? They must look carefully for all these questions in order to determine if the kids achieve their outcomes and meet their needs.

Should K-12 student surveys of their teachers be used to determine whether they get a boost in salary or be judged effective or ineffective? Based on surveys given to students about their teachers over the past decade, student judgments about their teachers are highly correlated with test scores. These questions measure classroom control and the degree to which teachers challenge students to work harder with academic content and skills. The New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit based in Brooklyn that recruits and trains new teachers, last school year used student surveys to evaluate 460 of its 1,006 teachers. In higher education, students have evaluated their professors’ teaching and course content for decades. Controversial or not in higher education, reform-driven policymakers and foundation officials, eager to find another metric beyond unstable end-of-year test scores that simply and inexpensively judges K-12 teacher performance, look to researchers to quantify student perceptions of how and what their teachers teach. Not, however, if student perceptions of teaching are sliced and diced to fit into little boxes that can be checked off by principals and superintendents to determine teacher effectiveness and pay.

Unlike most high-achieving nations around the globe, the United States has not created a national system to support teachers. The country also lacks incentives to ensure that all teachers are well-prepared and ready to pass on knowledge all students effectively when they enter the profession. There is also a lack of widely available methods to support the evaluation and the ongoing development of teacher effectiveness throughout their career. This goes along with the decision about their entry and continuation in the profession (Braun, 2010). Meeting the expectation that students will learn to high standards call on the transformation in the ways with which the education system attracts, prepares and supports expert teachers who can deliver

While anyone in education could tell you the easiest way to measure student outcomes are through standardized exams, and maybe that is why we have fallen prey to its allure; accountability tests are the least effective measurement for any student population. “...School systems focus on rote memorization and measurable, predictable results” (Struss, 2006). Education is the preparation of young citizens for a world that has not been created, thus there needs to be flexibility in the designed measures. If that is true for our students, then it must be also true for our teachers. The future of teacher development is slowly becoming based a standardized testing system that is completely irrelevant to our student populations and rarely take into account the real world. In order for teachers to shift their developmental thinking about students, administrators and supervisors needs to shift their perspectives on teacher evaluations and continuous growth that takes into account creativity, curiosity, collaborative behaviors and immeasurable results.

Bearing in mind that a system in which grades would determine teachers’ pay, the salaries would be differing amounts and establishing these diverse paychecks would be difficult. Deciding how to administer this new system of pay would make more work for the already messy school board system. According to Edutopia, The Denver Classroom Teachers Association agreed to award educators according to student progress. In this “pay-for-performance plan”, as they called it, educators would earn raises if their students met or exceeded the specific academic standards, in place of the typical factors used to decide pay such as, years of service and the teachers’ level of education. This however, raised the question of how the school board can adequately evaluate how much each teacher will receive. It would be very hard to impose this system among schools due to the fact that there is no specific way of evaluating teacher performance. Imposing this system would bring us to the question of what makes a ‘good teacher’? Measuring a teacher’s value in the education system is nearly impossible because there

Throughout history, education reformers worldwide have attempted to strengthen the ranks of public schools and find, train, and measure good teachers in a variety of ways. Many states have adopted teacher evaluation systems based on student test scores largely to receive federal Race to the Top grants or waivers from No Child Left Behind. These evaluations are mostly unwelcomed by educators nationwide, due to the unfair and ineffective consequences that have resulted from the evaluation systems.

This paper was created to explore the world of assessment issues in the education community. This paper was focused on using state tests in order to formally evaluate teachers. Teachers are being evaluated all the time to determine whether they are fit to be in the classroom. This paper focuses on the issues created by NCLB as well as race to the top. It has become a competition to have teachers get the best state scores on tests. These scores are how we are evaluating our current and possibly even future teachers.

I chose to focus on this topic because it is a topic that I have strong feelings about when it comes to education. It is a topic that is highly debated in our country and is a program that is said to fix the problem that some say we have in public education. In fact, we see this topic being discussed by the President and Secretary of Education as they have instituted the 4.3 billion dollar "Race to the Top" to enforce student achievement data into teacher evaluations and help enforce the concept of pay for performance. In this paper, we are going to look at performance pay and how we use student achievement to base a teacher 's effectiveness and if it is truly an effective way of helping increase our nation 's educational success.

Imagine if the medical profession worked like the education profession. Doctors are responsible for curing a patients ills, just like teachers are responsible for raising student performance. For doctors, there are many factors involved in treating the ill such as diagnosis, insurance, family history, medicine, treatment plan, and tests. For educators, there are also many factors involved in increasing student performance, such as identifying learning deficiencies, financial resources, student’s culture and socioeconomic background, curriculum, student effort, and standardized testing. Now imagine that doctors are held accountable for curing the patient although many of the factors are out of their control. If the tests don’t show that the patient is recovering it is entirely the doctors fault and they may lose their job or have sanctions placed against them. This is exactly how it is for teachers. Regardless of the factors that are out of the teacher’s control, if students don’t perform well on standardized tests, teachers are held accountable. Standardized tests are intended to measure student achievement, but they have been broadened to weigh teacher performance. One of the aspects that influences the trouble with standardized testing is how this high stakes teacher evaluation system creates unfair accountability pressure on educators.

Multiple problems with standardized testing have emerged that relate to the students and teachers; however, problems have also appeared with this testing that relate to the public. Test results are released for the public eyes to view, allowing them to judge a school on how the scores say it is doing. The problem with this is that it may misinform the public about what or how the school is doing throughout the school year. The grades on these tests vary because of four factors and according to Jouriles they are, “a teacher’s conception of achievement, a teacher’s sense of equity and rigor, a teacher’s skills, and the composition of students.” If these factors are not all in play at once, a student may not succeed on the test, which is not something he/she can control. Once the scores are released and the public sees that the overall grades are low, some may blame the children while others will blame the teachers. The person to blame in this situation is neither, standardized tests put both students and teachers under a tremendous amount of pressure to perform exceptionally well. Moreover, the scores are all averaged together - as to not show how an individual student did on a test - but this is categorizing him/her. The average scores may have been exceptional, but certain students could have not done well and they still do not understand the concepts they were supposed to learn. On the other hand, the average scores may be horrible, but certain students were able to succeed

The purpose of this paper is to serve as a critique of the education brief entitled, “Why School Report Cards Merit a Failing Grade,” written by Kenneth R. Howe and Kevin Murray of The University of Colorado Boulder for the National Education Policy Center. The purpose of the brief was to examine the practice by state governments of developing school accountability ratings systems, which rate schools across their respective states with an A-F, report card-style grade as a form of institutional accountability in the public domain. The authors of the brief were attempting to highlight some of the purported reasons behind the creation of these systems and systematically critique those arguments to demonstrate the failing of these accountability systems to meet their intended purposes. The primary analysis comes from examining the A-F systems for validity across three areas; validity as a measure of school quality, validity as a policy instrument, and validity in terms of providing a democratic framework for measuring student success.