Is it Possible for a Teacher to be Accountable without Being Responsible - Essay Example

This very link has been described and elaborated in respect to the ability of the teacher to balance the both, in this report. TEACHER’S RESPONSIBILITY The responsibility associated with an instructor is more than any other profession, as every profession demand education set of skills, which are only achieved once the person has undergone studies from a capable teacher, responsible enough to know his role in this world. Furthermore, Hartley (2002, 255) points out that a cheap, one-size-fits-all 'standard' in teacher education may turn out to be ineffective with regard to the promotion of human resources and the competitiveness of the economy in general.

The knowledge treasure requires creativity, team-work and self-execution; the teacher being handed complete freedom to built a set of self-assessments and parameters of responsibility. These are the salient features of the modern education policy model which are highly unlikely to be promoted. Furthermore, along with the demand for educators to conceive added responsibility, this feat is not as easy as it sounds. Therefore, attributing responsibility to a teacher is not a fact that can be gauges like temperature or any other quantitative material (Young 1998, 62).

TEACHER’S ACCOUNTABILITY EFFECTS Does accountability affect building or correcting the mechanisms of an education system? This question remains a core debate in the education circles. A different perspective looked into the effects brought upon by the accountability of an educator. The effects study shed light upon the accountability systems, so to create better policy mechanisms, which in turn create a better system and professional excellence (Darling-Hammond &Sykes, 1999) and/or a system that has a reward/punishment setup for the teachers (Odden, 2002).

In the modern era, research has shifted its focus from school politics to the performance analysis of the educators and the system in which they thrive. A new angle on accountability emerged as the policy makers shifted their attention on to the special role of teachers as it was before the fancy technology teaching methods took over (Fuhrman, 1999). This new form of observation by the policy makers is an effort towards enhancing the accountability of the educators, while they try to work on the areas of vigilance, observation, performance and open test results, making the system transparent.

Critics of this current system; lobby hard for the old system their prime argument being the non-influential relationship between the performance of the teacher and performance of the students and their test-scores. The hard-line example for this fact is the statistics of increased dropout rate since the application of the test-driven policies, specially affecting those students who stood on the borderline of passing and failing (Whitford & Jones, 2000). This in turn has smashed the teacher’s morale in general (McNeil, 2000) and made it a difficult environment for them as their performance is judged majorly through the stats of students, which more often than not is not the true picture.

ACCOUNTABILITY VERSUS RESPONSIBILITY Accountability devices show the importance of decentralizing responsibility of a teacher. National educational authorities have decentralized the responsibility for teaching quality to the school running agencies, which more often than not creates a local accountability system, hence placing more responsibility on the teacher’