by William Meyers

Created on: July 08, 2008

Teachers should be held accountable for low student test scores. But so should the students themselves, parents, politicians, and communities.

We know that many factors go into student achievement. Children whose parents use large vocabularies at home on average show better language skills than children of parents with limited vocabularies. Well-nourished children usually do better than poorly nourished children. Verbal abuse and physical violence at home are usually very detrimental. We cannot expect teachers to be able to turn every individual child into a high achiever when teachers have no control over the rest of their students' environment.

Teachers differ in how well they teach. The worst are lazy, disorganized, do not understand the subject matter they teach, or actively dislike their students. They should not be teaching. I don't think there are very many such teachers in most schools, but having even one teacher like that for one year can result in a child getting behind grade-level. Teachers will tell you how difficult it is to teach a class of students who had a poor or marginal teacher the year before.

The real question is not whether teachers should be held accountable, but how can they be held accountable in a way that is fair to them, their students, and our communities?

This is why holding teachers accountable by simplistic schemes related to test scores is not a good idea. I believe test scores can be meaningful if school systems have a well-designed curriculum and the tests measure how much of the curriculum the students have retained. Elementary school reading, writing and math curriculums are particularly important to a child's success in other subjects and later in life.

If a teacher does not want to follow the curriculum, the teacher should have to get a waiver from the school principle and the school board. It is possible to evaluate how well a teacher presents the curriculum. The best way involved review by peers and administrators. This could be subject to human error and prejudice, but a good review process should give accurate assessments.

Using standardized test scores is necessary because they provide a way to compare teachers with teachers in other schools or even in other states. They provide a check on the more subjective methods of holding teachers accountable. However, if you are going to hold teachers accountable, you need sophisticated analytic systems that can take other factors into consideration.

Holding teachers accountable

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