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 should be part of a broader program. As far as I can tell, most public schools do not even take truancy very seriously. Police departments do not like to act as truancy officers, but if they did it they would find that crime would decrease over time. Holding parents responsible is important. It is sad that society would even have to hold parents responsible, but clearly some parents need either help or outside pressure. I think we should experiment more with both rewards-based and penalty based programs for parents. Our whole nation should unite to say that if you are a parent, you must see that your child is in school and ready for school.
I think most teachers are dedicated and want to do their best as teachers. But even then a number of factors can keep them from doing their best. Having a strong educational leadership program within the teaching profession can help make average teachers into teaching powerhouses. I have seen the positive feedback loop when teachers learn how to best teach a curriculum, see the positive results in the students, and become energized and excited about their profession.
Many children and parents, and sometimes even teachers and administrators do not want to hear it, but a measure of discipline is necessary in an educational environment. A few disruptive children placed in a classroom can seriously impact the educational process. Parents, teachers and administrators have to make it clear that disruptions are not permitted.
Politicians and voters should be held accountable for adequately funding our schools. Some times politicians who are against school funding are hard to defeat in elections because of anti-tax sentiments of the voters. Such voters are penny wise and pound foolish. The best investment we can make is in our public schools. As a school board member I saw how state laws (in California) forced us to waste some money that could have gone to better use. So we do need to pry the greedy fingers of special interest groups off the funds that are meant to educate children.
In conclusion, teachers have to be evaluated in order to weed out the worst of them and help the others improve. Standardized test scores should be used in the evaluation process, but only when analytic systems are in place to fairly discern what results are do to teaching and what results are do to other factors.