Educational Accountability

I am not a Politician, a Pundit, a Polemicist, or a Professor. I have never run for public office nor do I have a Ph. D., so I do not belong to those two clubs, and the middle two would not want to own me. After all, I was only a lowly classroom teacher for 44 years, so what do I know? The 4 P’s (Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and Professors Who Should Know Better), after all, see things “from a distance.” They can look past troublesome causes and complications and see simple solutions that sound good. The problem is that according to a favorite proverb (I owe it to H. L. Mencken, I think), “For every complex problem there is a simple solution that is wrong.”

But all too often, when I read something by one of the 4 P’s pronouncing upon American education and Education Reform, I know they have it wrong. How do I know? Because I have confidence in my 44 years in the trenches as a great Reality Check, that’s how. The 4 P’s see things from a distance; I have seen them up close.

I have before me Leonard Pitts’ column of 8-3-2010, “It’s time for us to embrace educational accountability.” (I try to provide links whenever I can, but as I write this, my browser is doing strange things and won’t let me.) I have nothing against accountability. There ought to be more of it, by golly. In all my years of teaching, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t being held accountable. But I do get tired of the way the 4 P’s co-opt the word “accountability” and wave it about like a bloody flag.

Pitts’ thesis is that “school principals should have the power to fire teachers who do not perform.” Attached to this is the contention that “union protections being what they are, dumping a bad teacher – even a bad one – is an almost impossible task.”

Because Mr. Pitts is a nationally syndicated Pundit, he sees things from a lofty distance, simply, and he has just presented us with two major over simplifications. The problem is that once an oversimplification passes over into “conventional wisdom” where it is codified as “standardized error,” it becomes a falsehood. Misinformation becomes disinformation.

The professor of my Personnel class in my Administrator’s Certification program, a seasoned Superintendent, once told us “The principal who says he can’t get rid of a bad teacher is not doing his job – is not paying attention or is just plain lazy.” Throughout my career, during much of which I was a union building representative, I have observed that Dr. Chatburn was correct. Now, strictly speaking, in most states and districts, it is oversimplification to say the principal actually fires the teacher. The principal monitors the teacher, observes and documents his performance and/or behavior, and at the appropriate time recommends to the board that the teacher’s contract be renewed – or not, if he has been incompetent, derelict, or guilty of unprofessional conduct. In the case of really egregious conduct, the principal may even be able to suspend the teacher, pending a hearing before the board. But the principal does not directly fire the teacher, nor should he be able to do so. If the principal has been doing his job, and if the board is smart, they will pay close attention to the principal’s reasons for wanting to let the teacher go, as they did for the principal’s reasons for wanting to hire the teacher in the first place. (Whether the principal has any say over new hires into his building is another issue for another day.)

All of this is usually spelled out in the Master Contract, within parameters established by state law. It is the union’s job to see to it that all is done “by the book,” that the teacher has representation, that his side of a dispute is heard, that no teacher is deprived of his livelihood and his reputation except for just cause. The administration that fires a teacher just because it seems like the expedient thing to do is doing no one any favor, nor is the union that defends the indefensible.

My poster-child case is the English teacher who found her head on the block because she flunked a star athlete for refusing to do a required research paper. This brought the wrath of the boosters down on the administration. It appeared expedient to dump her. Did this make her a bad teacher? In the end, the union was able to negotiate a compromise “improvement plan.” Did the union thwart accountability? Or did it wimp out and do a bad turn for a teacher who was only trying to do the right thing? Admittedly, this was an extreme case, and a ludicrous one, but representative of some important issues, I think.

The right thing. What is The Right Thing? Who should be held accountable for what? How should they be held accountable, and by whom? What is a good teacher? Just the one whose students crank out good scores at test time? How does a principal know a good teacher, or a bad one, when he sees one? All this gets complicated quickly, but there is nothing simple about the American public education enterprise, its constituency, or the children it serves, no matter what the 4P’s would have us believe. Public educations interests are no more served by dumping teachers than by keeping bad one. The trick is to know the difference.

I cringe when a respected journalist talks about “dumping” teachers, when administrators brag about how many teachers they are firing, when I see on the cover of a major news magazine a picture of a principal swaggering down the hall of his high school carrying a baseball bat. This sort of “heroic” ideological posturing serves no one.