Essay on an Issue in Education

13Oct11

One of the most important determinants for high quality education is the quality of the teacher, and accountability is important for ensuring that current teachers are equipped with the necessary attitude, tools and skills for teaching well. And yet, public schools currently do not have an effective system of accountability to ensure the quality of teaching. Administrators cannot check on teachers without prior notification, which seems to defeat the purpose if lackluster teachers are then able to prepare a passable lesson for the day of checking.

Many efforts on the federal and state level have focused on student performance in schools as a measure of accountability (California’s Public Education Accountability Act, No Child Left Behind). However, they do not directly address accountability for teachers, whose teachings affect the quality of education in ways that measure beyond test scores. In the traditional public school system, efforts to improve the way that teachers are prepared and supervised remain difficult due to financial, organizational, or regulatory reasons. Larger policy reforms are also costly and difficult to deploy.

One model to address these challenges is the charter school system, which operates publically but is accountable to its students and freed from the policies that stymie traditional public schools. Organizationally, charter schools are nimble enough to experiment with different pedagogical approaches and have greater flexibility with funding. Thus, charter schools provide a possible platform for teacher accountability as a means to quality education.

The charter school system, however, has two important critiques. First is the claim of privatization, in which people claim that public money is being paid to private for-profit entities that run charter schools. Second is the claim of false promise, where many charter schools aren’t shown to be improving the test scores of its students. These, among other concerns, bring many people to doubt the efficacy of charter schools.

While the charter school system isn’t perfect, it offers new possibilities to attempt reforms that may address the challenges of its critics. One example is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a nation-wide, nonprofit network that has succeeded in providing a high quality education for underserved students. Through its focus on teacher training, KIPP not only nurtured high quality teachers, it demonstrated this through achieving high standards of excellence as well (with 85% of KIPPsters going to college).

There are many nonprofit organizations that collaborate with or manage charter schools. And because of the way they are structured, charter schools provide a good platform for collaboration with other organization to provide more support to charter school teachers throughout their career. Thus, increasing collaboration between such nonprofit initiatives and the charter school system can increase the quality of teachers while ensuring that public funds are being used for non-profit purposes.

Ultimately, charter schools represent an economically and politically feasible way of supporting teachers as a means to improving quality of education. Through working with nonprofits, charter schools may benefit from providing teachers with more training and support. Charter school networks like KIPP represent a model to helping hold teachers more accountable with delivering a high quality education. Hopefully, small-scale successes like these may in turn inspire larger policy reforms to support more of our teachers in the future.

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