Making Educators Accountable for Student Outcomes

Source: Bacon’s Rebellion.

While I appreciate the writer, Matt Hurt, and support the initiative he describes I sense that public schooling per se is the real problem at issue.

The purpose of the initiative is to make objective measurements of student achievement a highly significant factor in formal teacher evaluations. Apparently this has not been the case in the past.

Surely it is good to improve teacher accountability, but it occurs to me that in the natural order of things parents normally serve as teachers’ quality control function. In this light the initiative looks like an attempt to perfect bureaucracy at the expense of human relationships or as a substitute for parental engagement.

Sadly, perfecting bureaucracy may be the most we can do so long as the institution of public schooling continues. If we want the public to pay for the education of children, a better, simpler approach might be to just give the money to parents.