by Carol Natoli

Created on: September 08, 2010   Last Updated: November 15, 2010

‘Teacher Accountability’ is such a catch-phrase for every problem in education; one would wonder if students, themselves, or their parents have any responsibility!

Recently, a governor spoke about the accountability and ‘merit pay’.  While having ‘tenure’ is a controversial topic, there are well-deserved benefits of attaining tenure.  Think of it has having job stability and security as in other careers, within the corporate world; that is, in the past! It seems that even during this economic time, having tenure did not shield teachers completely.  In certain states, teachers that have worked up to 8 years, were given pink slips.  Yes, some were called back eventually, but not 100% of them.  While the governor spoke of budgetary reasons for a reduction in force, he also spoke of teachers leaving school districts because they didn’t deserve to stay based on end-results of children’s test scores.

How can a school’s tests results that are reported to the state, be fair?  It is important that tests results are high, which affects the rating of particular schools; however, why would Special Education scores be thrown ‘into the mix’?  These scores will definitely lower the school scores and one would find that in itself contradictory because “validity” always seems to be important for a test itself.  We ask if a test, is ‘valid’ which encompasses fairness and on ‘equal ground’, yet the test scores are not valid when children of different ‘playing fields’ are involved.

What about bilingual children or ESL children?  In many cases, children are new to the English language and intelligent but the English scores do not show that, since those children are smart when speaking their own language.  Some schools have, not only one third of their population consisting of Special Education students, but a third who do not even speak a word of English.  Some children have not even been to school in their own country, to be part of some sort of academia, and then come to the United States and their parents think they should be in the 7th grade!  They do not even know how to read first-grade words but are suppose to be thrown into pre-algebra classes?  What is wrong with this picture?  The fact that they never had 6th grade math in a school from which they came, it is impossible to solve this problem,

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