Accountability for Schools

* Gwynnae Byrd is right that Gov. Gray Davis and other school “accountability” advocates have a problem (Opinion, Jan. 17), and the problem is this: You can’t treat our schools like businesses that manufacture a product. If a widget-maker supplied with first-rate raw materials turns out widgets that don’t meet established standards, you can blame the factory. But widget-makers, unlike schools, never have to deal with raw materials that don’t want to become good widgets. Teachers can lecture, entertain, cajole, plead and even browbeat students from dawn to dusk, but it will be in vain if the students don’t want to learn and if the students’ parents don’t require them to learn.

Public education is a collaborative effort among teachers, students and parents. Teachers must want to teach, students must want to learn and parents must want their children to learn. Even with the best teachers in the world, the effort will fail if the other partners fail to do their jobs. The question is not how to keep schools accountable, but how to keep students--and their parents--accountable.

MARK LOWE

Anaheim

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Are we accountable for everything or for some reasonable measure of progress? I am a teacher at one of the 100 lowest-performing schools in Los Angeles Unified School District. Our enrollment is 1,400 and, shockingly, 72% of our students tested below the 50th percentile in the academics.

There is a great deal of criticism of teachers, but imagine a middle school classroom of 36 students, 24 of whom are already three years below grade level, and only one teacher. Aren’t the inherent problems evident?

Under these conditions, opportunities for remediation are minimal. Many students attended summer school under these same conditions. Tutorial programs do not address the needs of many of the students. It is difficult to accommodate 36 students with only 13 microscopes in a science class. Remedial resources are scarce and considered supplemental, so that they are not approved or funded through the same adoption process as textbooks.

These are just a few of the many problems we face in teaching.

AKOSUA HOBERT

Los Angeles