Should teachers be held accountable for low student test scores?
Learning is an act that requires the work of the student. Learning is facilitated by the teacher in that the teacher provides information and exercises for the students to do so that they can learn some subject. The teacher does not take the test, the student takes the test. The student is the only person who should be held responsible for a low test score, because it is the student who took the test. If all the students in some teacher’s class fail some test there is obviously some problem. Maybe the test was bad. Maybe the teacher sat around all day doing nothing and the students had no opportunity to learn. In that case the teacher should be fired. If the teacher did their job and provided work for the students to do, she should not be accountable if the students fail. There’s a lot of buzz these days to have standardized tests. In some cases, these tests are actually written up by legislators as requirements for all students. This takes the responsibility for learning away from the
