The Unforgiving Complexity Of Teaching

The current unprecedented emphasis on teaching quality emerged from the standards and accountability movement of the 1990s. From the beginning, the issue of "teaching quality" was framed as part of the larger movement to make schools, school districts, and teachers more responsible and accountable for students' learning. As a policy matter, a political priority, and in public opinion polls, teaching quality and teacher accountability are now inextricably tied. For example, the most recent Hart-Teeter poll, commissioned by the Educational Testing Service (Hart & Teeter, 2002), is entitled "A National Priority: Americans Speak on Teacher Quality. " This bipartisan public opinion survey found that even since September 11, improving education is a top priority for American adults, with only family values and fighting terrorism ranked higher. The link between teaching quality and teaching accountability is crystal clear in the poll's highlights: * The public strongly supports standards and accountability. Although Americans support measures to raise teacher quality, they continue to insist on reforms that raise standards and accountability for both students and teachers. * All groups recognize that the quality of teaching determines the quality of education. Americans want more and better teachers in the nation's schools. Nine in ten (91%) adults support offering more training programs so teachers can continue to learn and become better teachers. (Hart & Teeter, 2002, p. 2) The poll also indicates that Americans are willing to pay higher taxes for better teachers--including improved working conditions, higher salaries, and ongoing professional development--as long as these are linked to greater accountability. Along these lines, more than 73% of adults surveyed favored testing student achievement and holding teachers and schools responsible for their scores, and 70% wanted teachers tested on subject knowledge and skills. There is little debate in the education community about the assertion that quality of teaching and teacher preparation ought to be defined (at least in part) in terms of student learning. Few question the idea that the public has a right to expect that how teachers are prepared has something to do with what they know, how they teach, and what and how much their students learn. There are also few who question the assertion that higher education institutions ought to take some of the responsibility for these connections. Increasingly, however, the accountability bottom line--higher scores on standardized student achievement tests--is the singular focus of state and federal policies related to teaching quality and teacher preparation and a major focus of external funders and professional accrediting agencies that deal with teacher preparation. Increasingly, teaching quality and students' learning are equated with high-stakes test scores. It is this simplistic equating that is problematic rather than the larger notion of accountability itself. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 2001 established an unprecedented and greatly enlarged federal role in educational matters previously considered the purview of the states and/or of the educational community. ESEA legislates mandatory annual statewide testing of K-12 students in multiple subject areas and requires that schools hire only "highly qualified" teachers, certified through traditional or alternate routes and with passing scores on state teacher certification tests. As Richard Elmore (2002) rightly points out, ESEA also cements into law the equating of teaching quality and student learning with scores on high-stakes tests: The federal government further mandates a single definition of adequate yearly progress, the amount by which schools must increase their test scores in order to avoid some sort of sanction . the law sets a single target date by which all students must exceed a state-defined proficiency level. …