Where Decisions and Quality Intersect: A Brief Examination of the Impact of Teacher Empowerment and School and Teacher Accountability on Schools
This 10-page undergraduate paper examines the idea that “The only way to Improve schools is to empower the teachers and, at the same time, to make schools and teachers more accountable”. This paper suggests that teacher empowerment is a good way to improve schools and improve quality of education. Teachers have the most direct relationship with students, and are also the ones who most clearly see what changes need to be implemented. They also are professionals in a position to most directly impact education quality. Enhancing the ability of teachers to make key decisions about classroom methods, classroom size, planning time, budgets, and curricula can have an important impact on education quality. Making schools and teachers more accountable is a more problematic concept. Accountability can refer either to responsibility or to answerability to certain ideas or standards. Increased responsibility on the part of teachers and schools can improve the quality of education by making all members of a school feel responsible for student performance. However, in order to improve student performance and education quality, students must also be responsible for their own participation in their education. Teachers cannot be held responsible for students’ personal decisions to be disruptive or to leave assignments incomplete. In so far as accountability is also a method of examining and observing a structure, accountability must come primarily from within, rather than mainly from outside sources such as state school boards or district superintendents.
