Student Accountability: Education’s Forgotten Issue

When I was a college freshman, I took a U.S. history class where one of the first statements the professor made on the first day was that American education was sick.

Though I ended up dropping the class because this professor accused me of something that I didn’t do, I realized that he was right when I started to work with young people in schools.

As someone who over the course of approximately twenty years was a physical education instructor, a sports coach, a tutor, and an after school teacher who helped kids with their homework, I saw firsthand the issues plaguing education that has gotten much attention in the media as of late; I witnessed teachers being fired because the principal didn’t like their class seating arrangement, and I’ve experienced – many times – parents getting in my face and jumping my case due to them believing that I treated their child unfairly, among other things.

The issue of teacher accountability for student achievement, particularly in regards to standardized test scores, has come to the forefront in recent months.

The Los Angeles Times, for example, posted on their website the rankings of Los Angeles school teachers according to how well their students performed on standardized tests. It caused some controversy as A.J. Duffy, the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s teacher’s union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), called for a boycott of the Times because he felt that the rankings singled out teachers and portrayed the lower ranked ones as scapegoats.

Even though my aspirations for a career in education didn’t work out – for various reasons – and while I understand that the powers that be desire to hold teachers more accountable, as illustrated by a ballot measure proposed a few years ago that would have extended newly credentialed teachers’ probationary periods from two years to five in California (which ultimately didn’t pass), as well as to make parents know that their responsibility is to make sure that their children do their homework and things like that, there is one thing that I’ve always felt was completely overlooked and ignored too much of the time…

The accountability of the student in his or her learning and classroom performance.

It seems to me that in this era of charter schools, home schooling, and the ever-present struggle to prepare students for a 21st century society that they are often not ready for, especially in the low-income population, that it’s the responsibility of the students to learn, achieve, and succeed in school as much as it is the responsibility of the teacher to see that the students do these things, if not more.