Devil is in the Details: Teacher Tells Us What’s Up With Local Accountability
The current form of Texas-style No Child Left Behind high-stakes testing and accountability has run its course. It is very clear that after 20 years in Texas and 10 years across the nation, the sanctions and rewards (the rewards disappeared a long time ago) system never produced an education miracle in Texas (as posited by President Bush and Secretary Paige) and did not result in all students across the US being proficient by 2014.
In 2012, I first proposed a new bottom-up form of accountability in the post Accountability: Are you ready for a new idea? I have written extensively about this new form of locally-controlled accountability that I have called Community-Based Accountability here. Or see the post A Refresher: What is Community-Based Accountability? As discussed previously here on Cloaking Inequity, California has implemented Community-Based Accountability as a new reform for school finance and called it Local Accountability (See Bear in the Details: Codifying Community-Based Accountability’s Process). Over the past several weeks, folks from the education sector in California have reflected on the implementation of Local Accountability in California in the posts Local Accountability and Astroturf: Local Control without the Local Control and D.C. are you listening?: A New Local, Community-Based Approach for Accountability. Today Alice Mercer, a classroom teacher in Sacramento, reflects on the implementation of Local Accountability.
This piece will contain a lot of acronyms and include some of my insights (for what they are worth), so I’m going to start by introducing myself, and explaining a few of the basics here. My name is Alice Mercer, and I’m a classroom teacher in Sacramento City Unified School District, and large urban local in California (43,000 students, 38% are English Learners, and over 60% are low-income). I am also active in my union local, Sacramento City Teachers Association, and I was elected as a representative to the State Council of the California Teachers Association (CTA). The opinions in the article are only my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of either my school district, my local, CTA or NEA. I blog at Reflections on Teaching.This discussion centers around the new funding formula being used to allocate how California givesDevil is in the Details: Teacher Tells Us What’s Up With Local Accountability | Cloaking Inequity: