Justin DiCharia

Jindals teacher accountability program is doomed to fail

Louisiana State Sen. Elbert Guillory recently proposed the Classroom Protection Act (CPA)
allowing teachers to remove students with behavior problems when physical harm is imminent.
Proponents of the CPA cite the legislation as a measure to aid teachers in minimizing classroom
distractions that affect student performances on standardized tests.
Gov. Bobby Jindals education policy, combined with the CPA, uses subjective teacher
evaluations and students standardized test scores to hold teachers accountable for student
performance. These reforms improve Jindals standing in the national spotlight, but fail to
penetrate the education problem as a whole.
At the beginning of each year, the state determines each students growth expectations for the
designated standardized test. Growth expectations depend on a students attendance, discipline,
performance, and socioeconomic status from the previous year, completely overlooking statistics
from the current year. The state expects a student with perfect attendance the year prior to meet
growth expectations, even if that student missed 15 percent of the current year. Teacher
effectiveness cannot be accurately measured by the previous years statistics on attendance;
therefore the calculation for growth expectations do not accurately represent the conditions a
teacher deals with in the year being examined.
Gov. Bobby Jindals education reform ignores societal issues that contribute to low academic
performance, and instead puts the weight of student success or failure on teachers alone. Jindals
accountability system discourages strong, qualified teachers from working in poor school
districts.
Professors Bruce Keith and Paul R. Amato report in a study released by the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University that children with divorced
parents perform worse than children with married parents academically. Jindals education
policy ignores the role that parents have in the education of their children, and uses teachers as
the scapegoats of Louisianas troublesome education system.
Undoubtedly, Teachers must be held accountable to a certain degree. Unqualified and
unmotivated men and women in the education system harm a childs future rather than brighten
it. With that in mind, a comprehensive reformation of the states education system must include
parents. Simply including the rate of completed homework assignments, current attendance rates
and current disciplinary records within the growth expectations adds parents of schoolchildren
into the accountability program.
Sen. Guillorys legislation provides Gov. Jindal with an example of his reforms
protecting teachers from outside factors that would lower test scores. Realistically, the CPA has
face value only. The CPAs goal to protect teachers from students who would harm performance
ratings completely misses the factors of family life and mental health issues.
The growth expectations do give teachers lenience when students in special education
programs are in their class, but do not account for mental health issues that are either unnoticed
or not severe enough for a parent to enter his or her child into a program. According to the
C.D.C., 13-20 percent of children living in the United States experience a mental disorder within
any given year.
My mother, a fourth grade teacher, tells heart-wrenching stories of students exhibiting
symptoms of depression, bipolar disorder, Aspergers syndrome or other disorders going
unnoticed by parents. I hear stories of parents illogically taking their children off prescribed
medicine, forcing their child to suffer through the day; the student hardly soaking up a single
word my mother says.
The State must amend the current education legislation to factor divorce among parents,
students with mental illnesses that are not in special education programs, current attendance
rates, current disciplinary sanctions and rate of completed homework assignments into a teacher
accountability system. The CPA provides minimum protection for a teacher in Louisianas
education system. By including the rate of completed homework assignments, current
attendance rates and current disciplinary sanctions, the state can hold the parents partially
responsible for the academic success of their children, rather than only holding teachers
responsible.
Our childrens future is a communal responsibility; Louisiana teachers are not a scapegoat.




















References
http://www.cdc.gov/features/ChildrensMentalHealth/index.html
http://futureofchildren.org/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=37&articleid=107&
sectionid=691
http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/