Publication date:
25 October 2012Length of book:
180 pagesPublisher
R&L EducationISBN-13: 9781610486996
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 Glover’s 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 children’s futures.
By presenting the lead-teach-learn triad, Eric Glover’s 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 children’s futures.
Eric Glover is a leader, a practitioner, a professor, and a writer of ideas. Glover’s uplifting work is important especially given the rhetoric so often in today’s news about failing schools and ineffectual leadership. Effective school leadership, for Glover, is a product of one’s 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.