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For all the rhetoric about accountability in the schools, rare are the instances in which it is really tried, and even rarer are those in which it succeeds.

Yet it was not always thus.

More than 250 years ago individuals could face severe consequences if a child did not learn although, in those days before the existence of many schools and nothing remotely like a school system, the responsibility was placed upon the parents.  One provision in Massachusetts in 1745 was that a child who did not know the alphabet by age 6 could be removed from his home and placed with another family.  That would get your attention.  It also does not seem to have been frequently applied.

After another half-century had passed, schools had begun to appear in at least some states and thus they, or their teachers might face real consequences if they didn't deliver the goods.  Even at this early stage there were differences in income and achievement and concern for children from low-income families began to emerge.  One result, found in Georgia in 1817, was a law concerning schools with low-income students.  If such students failed to make good progress during a quarter local officials were forbidden to pay any salary to the teachers involved.

Fifty years after that, looking overseas to Scotland, an attempt to pay for results provided for rewarding schools for students with perfect attendance and for those over age 6 who showed proficiency in their subjects.  The results seem reminiscent, or, better, predictive, of today's No Child Left Behind law in the United States.  That nearly 200-year-old program, like charges regarding NCLB. reportedly led to greater attention to individual achievement but at the price of increased rote learning and restricting the curriculum.

In more modern times, Leon Lessinger, in his popular book, Every Child a Winner, in 1970, argued the responsibility for a failing student should fall upon the school, not, as it generally does, on the student.  He argued that the school, in such instances, should not only have to prove that the program they provided did work with other students but that no program it could have offered a failing child would have worked.  The interesting side effect of such a requirement, as Lessinger himself noted, would be that it would be necessary for the involved educators to have a wide and deep knowledge of a wide variety of educational programs.

Needless to say, his proposal, whatever merits it might have in theory, quickly joined countless other suggestions, before and since, in the category of rhetorical accountability with no practical consequences.

From long before then, until the present day, the educational establishment has learned to "talk the talk" without ever having to "walk the walk."   Whether by outright opposition, stonewalling, playing delaying tactics until their adversaries give up, or other means, educators and their allies have managed to keep anything approaching true accountability from seeing the light of day.  Too many school boards and administrators fail to make meaningful efforts to hire competent teachers, a stage at which they have considerable leeway, or retain the competent and weed out the incompetent, or even the mediocre average, during the first two years of employment where an appreciable amount of flexibility still remains.

As an Erie, PA Morning News editorial said on May 7, 1975, "there is probably no more defensive profession – and we use the terms loosely – than teaching.  Simple questions about accountability and competency invariably move educators en masse into a defensive role. they stand in a circle like musk oxen, horns out...the only thing we see inside the ring is their own rear ends."

And the courts don't help.  In a decision not the first of its kind, Colorado Courts ruled that the Denver Public Schools are not required to provide a quality education to its students.

Its success at being mediocre is why the public school establishment is its own worst enemy.  In 1980 there were an estimated 10,000 homeschooled students, and none in charter schools.  Today there are some 2,000,000 and 1,000,000 respectively - and growing.

Public schools failing their students increasingly find those students going elsewhere.

As they should.

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"For the last fifty years, American Education has pursued a policy of overstatement about its role and substance; it has lived by continual exaggeration of what it is for and what it can do."  Jacques Barzun, 1978, Michael Murray, Ed., A Jacques Barzun Reader, NY: HarperCollins, 2002

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Copyright 2006 David W. Kirkpatrick
108 Highland Court,
Douglassville, Pennsylvania 19518-9240
Phone: (610) 689-0633