The Myth of Accountability: What Don't We Know

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

School improvement that is reliant on accountability is a myth based upon falsehoods and wrong assumptions. Public educations increased dependence on this foundation for school reform and change has failed both students and teachers. The fact remains that people who create education policy do not understand what is best for individual students and classrooms. Their devised curriculum standards are, in actuality, curriculum limits that prevent students from creating successful personal and academic futures because they thwart any natural learning exploration. As such, these market-inspired, externally-motivated standards limit higher-level learning. Instead of treating students and teachers as subjects to be actively engaged in learning, accountability systems treat students and teachers like objects to be manipulated by training.

By presenting the lead-teach-learn triad, Eric Glovers The Myth of Accountability discusses the pitfalls of accountability systems in schools, while also investigating how schools have somehow managed to improve in spite of their negative influences. In order to evolve school reform, Glover introduces the concept of developmental empowerment in order to frame how school participants must view themselves as perpetually changing learners and systematically update school reform. Through open inquiry, Glover encourages educators to challenge the standardization and accountability practices that limit childrens futures.

Reviews

Eric Glover is a leader, a practitioner, a professor, and a writer of ideas. Glovers uplifting work is important especially given the rhetoric so often in todays news about failing schools and ineffectual leadership. Effective school leadership, for Glover, is a product of ones moral and ethical responsibility rather than any outwardly imposed notions of accountability. We can either choose to be victims to others misplaced and uninformed criticisms or we can commit to lead. But, whichever way we go in the end we own the choice. Ultimately, Glover reminds us that schools are about people, about children, and about their stories. They are not factories or complicated machines operating sequentially and relentlessly. Rather, schooling done well is a place where human capacity is acknowledged and a place where we still find time to have recess. -- Zach Kelehear, Dean of the College of Education and Vice President for Instruction and Innovation, Augusta University
Eric Glover is an educational leader and scholar who truly 'gets it' in this time of radical change occurring in schools across our nation. His voice joins others who are sounding the alarm as to what is truly happening within the reform movement. He not only clearly defines the issues, but offers a workable solution for practitioners and school leaders. Educators should have two copies of this book...one to read and use, and one to give to a local or state policy maker. -- Linda Stroud, Director of schools, Greenville City Schools, Greeneville, TN
I met Eric Glover over twenty years ago when he was the new Principal at my sons' elementary school. He inspired me to become a teacher. I have worked with Eric as he has evolved as a school leader and change agent. Much of what he presents in The Myth of Accountability, I have been doing because of our professional work together. He provides us with a model for creating learning places where nothing is impossible and leading results in lasting change. The conversations of teachers and school leaders are the same in high-achieving schools and struggling schools, in charters and traditional schools. But rarely can educators be true to what we know is right. The constant balancing of the requirements of the state with the needs of the school have left us with little stamina to create institutions that focus on learning. At a time when technology and invention are dramatically changing the world in which we live, and when agility is crucial to the existence of public education as an institution, we are restricted by policies and legislation that not only limit but actually prevent responsiveness. Eric has given us a framework and the ideas for applying them that will sustain us through the changes needed to reclaim our profession. Public education might be the last vestige of democracy and this book gives us the wisdom to guarantee that it endures. -- Cindy Montoya, Principal, New Mexico School for the Arts, Santa Fe, NM

Author Bio

Eric Glover, EdD, is professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis Department at East Tennessee State University. In addition to administering and teaching in a school administrator development program, he facilitates and writes about the development of authentic leadership practices in schools and school districts.