Then when summer arrived in earnest, I dug in to and finished The Oz Principle by Connors, Smith, and Hickman, and Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. In the waning week of school and waxing weeks of summer, I reviewed The Innovator’s Mindset by George Couros, and Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. During the spring I read a couple of purely business-focused leadership books, The Loyalist Team, and Leadership Literacies. So, as I often do, I looked to research and evidence to point the way. We crossed the finish line with a sigh rather than with arms held high like accomplished athletes. And, despite achieving a major milestone this year by completing the American Montessori Society accreditation process, I felt at times that the staff viewed the year as an example of a school running to stand still. I felt that this year I slid backwards in my personal responsibility to others – I was devastatingly slow to return emails, behind in my evaluations, and generally ineffective in moving forward on the large goals of the school. So I eagerly competed for a copy of The Oz Principle at a recent CPS training. Accountability to creating students who are curious, who can research and think independently, who set high goals for their own behavior and achievement, and who care for one another? Now we’re talking. Accountability to accomplishing high test scores? By itself, that can be damaging and depersonalizing. Only from within a framework of accountability can the important work of education be accomplished. But nothing could be further from the truth. One might allege that we are against accountability.
We’ve shown how the accountability movement contributes to teacher burnout.Īnd we have discussed, time and time again, how the most important things at school cannot be measured. We’ve demonstrated how the accountability movement works to identify (and punish) schools who serve communities with high poverty rates. In fact, our book title even implicitly indicts school accountability as a sort of foil to empathy and compassion: Angels and Superheroes: Compassionate Educators in an Era of School Accountability.
Krista and I have written a lot about the downside of the accountability movement in education.
0 kommentar(er)
