When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot: Lessons for Teachers in Misguided Accountability
If we imagined a pictorial representation of the evolution of education accountability, similar to the standard image we associate with human evolution—
—then we’d have to confront that the accountability era begun in the early 1980s focused first on students, requiring them to pass exit exams (regardless of their having taken and passed all of the required courses for graduation) in order to receive their diplomas.
Next, schools were the target of accountability with the advent and distribution of school report cards.
By the end of the first and beginning of the second decades of the twenty-first century, teachers have found their place at the accountability table, with some suggesting that teachers are now being fed their just desserts. Merit pay linked to student test scores and the more recent flurry of implementing value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluation and retention in many ways bring teachers into decades-long predicaments faced by students and schools: the misguided