Academic Accountability

The No Child Left Behind Act has imposed new requirements on the nations schools. Teachers and schools are scrutinized based upon standardized tests which may or may not be relevant to the actual determination of whether the schools and teachers are performing adequately. However, if the nation wants real improvement in their school systems, then we need to reevaluate the amount of time we are willing to devote to the education process, not the testing method of evaluating the education system.

The determination of whether the schools are performing adequately by obtaining a snapshot view of a child’s reading and math levels at the end of the year does not show the child’s performance levels. A more accurate assessment of the education system is to test the students at the beginning of the year and again at the end of the year and evaluate their improvement. If a child is below reading level at the beginning of their fourth grade year, but they are closer to reading level at the end of the year, then their improvement has been significant and the schools can accurately state that they are properly educating the students and have successfully taught the student even though they may still be below level. On the other hand, if a student is at reading level when they start the fourth grade and remain at reading level at the end of the fourth grade, the child arguably has not improved. Nonetheless, the student with little or no improvement is the student the teachers are praised for having in their classrooms.

No Child Left Behind is a back door method of allowing students to leave the public school system and get into private schools with government funding (vouchers, charters, etc.) However, a recent study has shown that when public and private schools are controlled for the socio-economic differences, the pubic schools are outperforming the private schools. The public school system is merely getting criticized for doing their job and educating all of the nations children and not just those in a high income bracket who can afford to attend the private schools.

If we really want to see improvements of the school system, we need to revamp the education process, not by shifting from public to private system, but by spending more time educating our children. In most of the nation there are only 180 days of school. Most students spend less than eight hours in the classroom each day. Schools that start at 7:00 a.m. are ending around 2:00 p.m. In many teachers collective negotiations agreements the teachers are instructed that they must remain in the school for only a short amount of time after the students leave. So if students leave at 2:00 p.m., then the teachers have to remain until only 2:30 or so. Thus, if a student is looking for additional assistance, they are denied it because some teachers (not all) are leaving as soon after the last class as they can, even though they have not worked a full eight hour day as most full-time workers are required to work.

Our school systems cannot try to compete with international schools if we are not going to commit the time and energy to educating the students. The school year needs to be lengthened to at least 200 days per year, and the school day needs to become a real day of 9:00 to 5:00. During the summer, students forget a great deal of what they learned the year prior because they are not in class having the information reinforced. Further, more classes and material can be covered if the students remain in the classroom and not being unleashed early each afternoon. Only by committing the time necessary to educate our children will real improvements be accomplished.