Un-Educated

A recent report about cheating among Atlanta educators brings to light the grossly mis-concieved  national trend toward accountability in education. The trend is probably the brain storm fart of some highly degreed educator who has never even spent a full semester standing in front of a classroom full of kids. Instead, probably scared to death of the responsibility and monumental challenge faced by frontline teachers everywhere, this/these brainiacs came up with the genius idea that we should hold teachers accountable based on the performance of their students on standardized tests.

I watched a short film the other evening called "Becoming13" that followed three 12 year-olds in their thirteenth year. One of the remarkable observations the film allows is the staggering difference and influence of parental involvement, judgement, and steering. And there's the rub: Teachers cannot be held wholly accountable for the work of their students any more than a car can be held accountable for a crash. A car can be accountable for causing a crash but it's a far less common occurrence than the failure of the human factor. Likewise, a teacher is occasionally bad and responsible for poor performance but, far more often than not, it is the home, the parents, that should shoulder the blame for poor performance.

And so here we are, reading about a series of educators motivated to cheat on behalf of their students in order to keep their jobs and, I presume, earn their various incentives and bonuses.

I'm sympathetic and cynical in part owing to the fact that doctors and hospitals in America are being held to the same standard more and more. It's a little harder to cheat in healthcare, though. It's difficult to hide illness and death.

The bottom line is we seem to be trying to address our most serious social problems from the wrong end of the equation. In a society that is characterized more and more by a lack of personal integrity and responsibility, by parents with no commitment to their child's safety, health, and education, in a society where we are constantly seduced to overeat and enjoy the wrong kinds of food, a society where it just has to be someone else's fault-- we are blaming those who are left trying to deal with the mess rather than those who are making it in the first place.

Those educators in Atlanta were wrong to do what they did. The system, however, is the larger offender.