More on education, accountability and privatization

Read this post over at the Christian Kantianist if you haven't yet, comment on it, then come back here and read this post. And give me my freaking sweater back.

I have two comments I want to make, and I think they deserve their own post.

First is the issue of accountability. I think that when we talk about holding teachers accountable, we're really conflating at least two issues: the broad, abstract question of "To whom are teachers accountable?" and the procedural, pragmatic question of how we measure teacher success and what we do with the results. This comment is concerned with the former.

Secondary school teachers are accountable to their students, to their students' parents, to their peers, to the chairs of their departments, to their school administrators, to their county administrators, and to every taxpayer in their jurisdiction. The parents of every single one of my wife's students have her e-mail address and her cell phone number. The students can come during her office hours and during scheduled tutoring times to get tutored or to discuss classroom approaches. Her department is responsible for making decisions among themselves about the way they want things handled, the equipment and supplies they want, and the ideas they have, and presenting those decisions to the rest of the faculty and the administrators. She is evaluted several times a year by her boss, an assistant principal, and those results are seen and discussed by different groups of teachers and administrators at different levels. On multiple back-to-school nights each year, parents and other members of the public are invited to discuss the progress of the students or educational issues in general.

In what other area is the system set up with more apertures for the public to influence it? What civil servants have more transparent lives than teachers? barnabas18 asked "Why wouldn't schools like the accountability of teachers needing to perform to earn their money?" They do like it, because in good schools, it's already in place.

Second is the issue of government, the view of government that is espoused in posts like this one. standingout's questions, while legitimate and provocative, presuppose "government" as a distinct entity from "the people." This view allows standingout and others with his views to say things like this:

"The government needs to gradually give our society back to us."

I believe I can cast doubt on this distinction with an example. Just up the road from me in Montgomery County, MD, a heated and important debate is taking place on the role of schools in teaching about sex and homosexuality. (Catch up here.) Initially, this seems to support the view of standingout and barnabas: that schools, as a government institution, have the power to go against the will of the people by shoving certain curricula and ideas down our throats whenever they want. But, a close read of the WP article proves that view completely wrong.

The school is merely the place where this debate is happening. It's incorrect to view this as a debate between the school and the people. On one side of the debate are students, parents, teachers, administrators, and elected officials; on the other side of the debate are...students, parents, teachers, administrators, and elected officials. They're merely having this debate in the context of curriculum:

"Jim Kennedy, a Montgomery County parent and member of Teachthefacts.org -- a group that supports comprehensive sex education in the county's public schools, including discussions regarding homosexuality -- said it's important for kids to understand what homosexuality is, in part because they may be struggling with issues of sexual identity."

QED.