Imagining Successful Schools

Subject: Imagining Successful Schools Sat Aug 30, 2014 11:25 pm

What should teacher accountability look like?

...When a school falls short, instead of looking to fire teachers, the high-performing countries “use the data to decide which schools will receive visits from teams of expert school inspectors. These inspectors are highly regarded educators.”

Tucker envisions the same kind of accountability for teachers as exists for, say, lawyers in a firm — where it is peers holding each other accountable rather than some outside force. People who don’t pull their own weight are asked to leave. The ethos is that people help each other to become better for the good of the firm. Those who successfully rise through the ranks are rewarded with higher pay and status.

Would the teachers’ unions go along with such a scheme? The unions would certainly have to shed some of the things they now have, such as control of work rules. But they would gain so much else: “Management would get their prerogatives back and would be held accountable for results, but the professionals, granted far more autonomy, would be also holding each other accountable for the quality of their work, as professionals everywhere do.”

As our conversation was coming to an end, Tucker told me that he was working with the State of Kentucky to implement some of the reforms he had outlined in his report. If it works there — and there is no reason it shouldn’t — perhaps we’ll finally get over our fixation with test-based accountability, and finally re-engineer our educational system the way every other successful country has.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/opinion/joe-nocera-imagining-successful-schools.html?_r=0

Imagining Successful Schools

Imagining Successful Schools

Anarcho-Capitalist Categorical Imperatives

AnCaps & Psychology, Edumbcation, Even IndoctriNation