The Kalamazoo Teacher Accountability Project

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According to Schacter, (2008) the Kalamazoo Teacher Accountability concept elicited hostility from 93 per cent of the educator participants involved in the study because research established a defensiveness among educators, largely due to the existing system of performance measurement for students.

The developmental path of research to date has then evolved to inform about personal attributes, knowledge, skills, characteristics, teaching methods and behaviors distinguish high caliber educators from mediocre ones.

Teachers of the highest caliber exist, and can be developed with a focus on efforts to develop and acquire actual teaching performance. A knowledge base must be established and continuously updated to aid in the development in the quality of the educator. Effective teaching exists, but it appears that there is a need for definition, and measurement related to student achievement.

Initially, the issue of pretests and posttests made sense to the teachers as means for deriving instructional decisions. Teachers typically use a pretest to ascertain the current knowledge base of the children. Unfortunately, teachers have not been given the adequate skill base to assist them in deciding what to teach, and at what depth. As was the case with the Kalamazoo study, teachers may have a notion of being evaluated, but they do not understand the totality of their accountability, which extends past their personal immediacy to generations of students and future educators. Hence, the efficacy

of the pretest needs to be more scrutinized. Students must understand the purpose of the pretest that scores do not count toward a grade, and that know that the result of the test is not to achieve high performance in a competitive realm...

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Milken Family Foundation (2000) Teacher Advancement Program Toolkit, version 3.

Milken, L. (1999). A Matter of Quality: A Strategy for Assuring the High Caliber of America’s Teachers. Presented at the 1999 National Education Conference President’s Presentation. Santa Monica, CA: Milken Family Foundation.

Milken, L. (2000). Teaching as the Opportunity: The Teacher Advancement Program. Presented at the 2000 National Education Conference President’s Presentation. Retrieved from the Internet 9-11-2011 Santa Monica, CA: Milken Family Foundation.

Obara, S. (2008) School accountability: mathematics teachers struggling with change. Journal of Case Studies in Education. Retrieved from the Internet 9-11-2011 http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/10685.pdf

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