Talking the Accountable Talk… Without Walking the Accountable Walk

“Accountable Talk”

New York City public school teachers know that phrase well. It is one of those buzz words that came with the wave of “progressive education” programs from Teachers’ College. As these programs became the “official state ideology” of the Department of Education, stripped of all actual progressive content, terms like “accountable talk” became the by-words of the Bloomberg-Klein era. “Accountable talk” purportedly makes students responsible for their own learning, as they must demonstrate what they have learned in ritualized presentations. Leave it to academics to take a profound thousand year old educational concept like the Socratic dialogues, translate it into an unthinking formula and bestow a ‘new age’ title upon it.

Accountability is all the rage at Tweed these days, so long as it is accountability for schools, educators and students. Before the Spring break, Chancellor Klein unveiled a new accountability plan which would employ rather complex and opaque statistical measures to evaluate the academic progress of student cohorts in schools. Klein pledged that, unlike the absolute standards of No Child Left Behind, the DOE’s new measures will capture the true progress of students, giving schools credit for “value added” to a student’s skills and knowledge. As promising as that may sound, the Tweed’s track record on implementing far less logistically ambitious programs, such as the new programming software used in high schools, has been less than impressive. Count us among the skeptics: we’ll believe it when we see it.

It certainly does not inspire confidence that, according to the New York Times[$], Tweed will employ student performance on SATs as one of the primary measures for assessing the performance and progress of high school students. This is clearly an extraordinary misuse of those exams, as they are not achievement tests designed to assess how well the students have learned the material from their high school classes. The College Board, the creator and marketer of the SATs, explicitly renounces the suggestion that they measure a student’s academic achievement. Instead, it makes the rather limited claim that these tests are somewhat predictive of a student’s prospective performance in the first year of college. What this means in practice, psychologists and psychometricians tell us, is that the SATs test for approximately 18% [within a statistical range of 7% to 25%] of the skills needed to succeed in college. Indeed, as it becomes murkier and murkier exactly what the SATs do test, more and more post-secondary institutions are moving away from requiring them. But Tweed is walking through the swinging door they just exited.

No set of tests have been more carefully and fully studied than the SATs, and few are anywhere as controversial. [The classic text on the subject is Nicholas Lemann’s Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.] Even with all of the disagreement, a few basic facts are clear. SAT scores correlate most closely with the scores of I.Q. tests [as much as they correlate with a second retake of the SATs.] When one considers the origins of the SATs as an assessment of native intelligence, these results are not that surprising. [Originally, SAT stood for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests.] Moreover, SAT scores correlate highly with the socio-economic status of the test taker. Using SAT scores as a measure of student performance benefits those schools which attract the highest socio-economic class of students, and penalizes those who serve the poorest. And exactly how does one measure progress on the SATs, when the tests are designed to produce consistent scores? Tweed’s use of SAT scores is antithetical to its purported desire to employ “value added” assessments.

The immediate target of the Klein accountability plan appears to be the school principals [$], although the measures do have broader applicability. Certainly, the principals – who have gone for many years now without a contract – think so, and they are none too pleased.

But the real story here is who is not being held accountable, once again. For all of Klein’s rhetoric about “holding ourselves more accountable,” what stands out is the continuing total lack of accountability for the DOE’s top management, from the Chancellor himself and the rest of Tweed down to the regional educrats. Nothing reveals that more than the recent events at IS 172 in Harlem, the Adam Clayton Powell Middle School of Law and Social Justice, a school that has had more than its share of troubles.

Early last month, Teach for America announced that it was pulling all of its recruits from IS 172, the first time it has ever done that, because of the unabated violence in the building. Despite this unprecedented vote of no confidence from a nationally recognized organization, and despite intense opposition from teachers and parents from the school, the Department of Education appointed the acting incumbent to the position of principal on March 23^rd. The date is significant because two days prior, on March 21^st, the same individual had been indicted on six accounts of fraud relating to his actions as principal of a Philadelphia charter school which had had its charter revoked. It was not until the Daily News ran an article exposing the entire sordid affair, “His past tags new principal,” that Tweed actually pulled the newly appointed – and indicted – principal from the school.

The Department of Education claims that it had performed all of the appropriate background checks on this individual, and nothing had come up. [He had been recruited by Tweed’s infamous Leadership Academy.] If they are to be believed, the folks at Tweed never learned how to use Google, since a simple search of the name of the principal and the name of charter school would have yielded a number of news media reports which detailed the travails of the school and the ongoing investigation of alleged wrong doing. Indeed, a Google search the day the principal was appointed would have revealed United States Attorney and Federal Bureau of Investigation press releases announcing his indictment. Moreover, it defies common sense that a background check performed with a minimum of due diligence would not have turned up serious questions about this individual’s tenure at the Philadelphia charter school, given the revocation of its charter. An Associated Press article reported that during the tenure of this principal, “teachers periodically threatened to quit en masse. Standardized test results weren’t reported to the state. Fire code violations once forced cancellation of classes for two weeks. Pennsylvania’s auditor general cited the school for bookkeeping problems.” But according to DOE spokesperson, the only one at fault is the principal, who failed to “inform” them of the investigation and the indictment.

The teachers and parents from IS 172 don’t buy any of it. “When he was first hired, the investigation was not only pending, it was public knowledge,” one English teacher told the Daily News. “Don’t come to me and lie to me, [that] you didn’t see it in his background checks,” the school PTA President complained to the Daily News. “This is disgusting.”

More than forty teachers had signed a petition against giving the principal a permanent appointment, and had been ignored by the powers that be at Tweed and in the region. “The staff was completely demoralized,” another English teacher told Daily News columnist Errol Lewis. “It’s really impossible for us to do our job with the level of the discipline problem.”

Note that this story is part of long term criminal neglect of IS 172 by Tweed. In the last four years, the school has had four separate principals, with cycle after cycle of ineffective leadership. Little surprise, therefore, that 97% of its graduating eighth graders did not meet state standards on the English Language Arts exam, and that 89% did not meet state standards on the Mathematics exam.

But Joel Klein is “serious” about accountability – for the school. If the standardized tests don’t improve, he warns, he will close the school down. No consequences for the Leadership Academy, which recruited the indicted principal without even the most cursory of background investigations; no consequences for the regional Superintendent and LIS, who ignored the pleas of teachers and parents and appointed a principal who had driven Teach for America from the school, who ran his last school into the ground and who was indicted for actions taken at that school; no consequences for the regional Superintendent and LIS who sent a parade of ineffective school leaders through the school for the last four years; no consequences for those in the DOE senior management, starting with Klein himself, responsible for oversight of the Leadership Academy, the Regional Superintendent and the LIS. No, accountability begins and ends at the school, and it alone will be closed down.

Klein talks the accountable talk, but he has yet to walk the accountable walk. Not one step.