Sly & the Family Stone, ” Everyday People” (click to listen or download).
How one person’s abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of the teacher’s business. It is irrelevant to his work. What is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have meaning.
John Dewey
Democracy and Education, 1916
The current “accountability” madness is almost all based on misusing metrics of questionable value to make comparisons among students, among teachers, among schools, among districts, among nations (see here and here for two recent manifestations). If we are going to be “holding people accountable,” I’d prefer the metric be whether they are providing all students with the “opportunities to employ his [or her] own powers in activities that have meaning.”
Related: National Opportunity to Learn Campaign and Opportunity to Learn Wisconsin.
Thomas J. Mertz
AMPS 