Today is one of the happiest days of the year.  It is the last day of school.  Joy and excitment fill the air around me, and that is just in the faculty lounge.  Here are few thoughts on education reform in honor of this final day of classes.

Teacher accountability has become a front burner issue in education reform cirlces as more and more reformers in postitions of power (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee) begin to take on the major unions on the issue of teacher tenure.  Since I work in Texas tenure is not an issue.  We do not enjoy collective bargaining, nor are were contracted by the state.  Teacher accountability is a key issue for improvement in education whether the work force is unionized or not.  The key to teacher accountability is to collect information about teacher performance from a variety of sources.  Schools should absolutely track the improvement of individual students from grade level to grade level based on test scores.  This is the easiest way to gather statistical, objective information about teacher performance - looking at the achievement of students.  However, because the act of teaching is also a performance of many tasks and skills that tests simply cannot measure, futher information should be gathered and evaluated.  In Texas most teachers are formally observed in the act of teaching a class by a trained administrater.  This has two benefits.  First it puts administraters in classrooms, and second it allows for a criterion based assesment of a teacher's classroom performance.  Colleges and universities regularly ask students to evaluate the performance of faculty members.  Public schools can and should collect this type of data as well.  Even very young children can fill out an evaluation form and report their feeling about the performance of their teacher.  Parents can also be asked to evaluate teacher performance.  Teachers could also be required to look at these various pieces of data and then defend their performance in front of a panel of peers and administraters - something like defending a doctoral dissertation maybe.  I understand that implementation of this type of program is both costly and time consuming, but if teacher accountability is necessary to improve public education, and it is, then the evaluation of teachers must measure their performance in a variety of ways, and teachers themselves should be required to look at, discuss, and defend their performances.

Furthermore, schools must re-exam the way technology is used and implemented in classrooms.  This generation, for better or for worse, has a completely different relationship with technology than previous generations.  Where most teachers see technology as a tool, students see technology as lifestyle.  Kids use information technology effortlessly.  If they need to know something, they google it.  If they want to share the information with others, they text it.  Then they go to school, where they are forbidden to use cell phones, where access to computers is serverly limited, and where they are protected from the bad stuff on the internet by firewalls that also end up blocking valuable content related resources.  No wonder they are bored.  They know that information can be located and delivered almost instantly, yet they sit in classrooms that still operate the way they did a fifty years ago.  Until we catch up with where they are technologically, until we figure out how to use all technology to get information to kids and help them use and understand it, we will continue to loose their attention and respect.

Finally, the time has surely come to open everything going on in education to scrutiny.  Abundant evidence suggests that the traditional school calendar - based on the needs of an 19th century agrarian culture, is obsolete.  Let's allow brave schools, parents and students to experiment with other calendar options, and make it easier bureaucratically for them to do so.  We know that attention spans shorten in the face of new technologies.  Let's examine length of classes and the overall arrangement of the school day.  Research indicates that while homework rarely does any harm to learning it also seems to do little good, yet it is continually assigned for reasons and in ways that research shows are ineffective.  This list could go on and on.

It is time for the education mainstream to begin to challenge its own preconceived notions about how schools should be administered and how teachers should be evaluated.  To do less is to change the bandaid on a gaping wound when we have a chance to stitch it closed.