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Editor's Note

I sat with Yétúndé Láníran at her dinner table one night in March while dusk settled outside. Porch lights were coming on up and down the street in her North Portland neighborhood. It was cozy inside. Yétúndé considered the question I’d put to her: “When you think of ‘accountability in public education,’ what does that mean to you?” In preparing this issue of Northwest Education, we had talked with teachers, administrators, and policymakers around the region about their views on accountability. Now, I wanted to hear a parent’s perspective.

Yétúndé, I knew, would be a good person to ask. She’s a parent of two boys who go to public schools in Portland—Mayowa, a sixth-grader, and Yinka, who’s in first grade—and she is a single, working-mom professional. She’s one of those people who can always be counted on. People at her church get wide-eyed and positively gush when talking about Yétúndé’s generosity and warmth. Not a few young people—her sons’ friends, her friends’ daughters—spend weekends in her home, finding comfort and, sometimes, the right measure of tough love. I knew, too, that she’d have a fresh perspective on the question. She is an expatriate of Nigeria, having come to the United States more than a dozen years ago to earn a doctorate in phonology—the physics of sound—from Cornell University. She stayed in the United States, her home country never being politically stable enough to return to, and she’s done what so many expatriates do: She stays in close touch with her extended family back home by phone, e-mail, letters—and sends money, whenever she can. Being accountable to others is the fabric of her life. She looked at me and answered readily.

“It’s reciprocal. Parents have a role. Teachers have a role. The school administrators have a role. The students themselves have a role; they have to be accountable, too, otherwise it can be all on the teachers.”

She’s sometimes frustrated because Mayowa isn’t always as challenged in school as she’d like for him to be. He’s a gifted learner and his middle school only offers one accelerated class, an AP course in math.

“He’s doing well in school but he finishes his work too soon,” Yétúndé says. “I tell Mayowa, ‘You’re not challenging yourself in school. You hurry and get your homework done and then you spend time watching TV.’ And he’ll say, ‘But I’m on the honor roll.‘ And I’ll say, ‘That’s exactly my point!’

“One thing I hate about my job is that I don’t get off work until the end of the day, and then I’m too tired to work with him on extra projects and study. “I could get workbooks from Barnes & Noble and I could go through them with him,” she says wistfully. “Parent involvement is so important.“

The reality is that, like most working parents, she must rely heavily on her son’s teachers to meet his learning needs. “I want him to do well academically, but that’s asking teachers who are not that well paid to do more things after school. How much more do I want to ask of teachers to challenge my talented kid, you know, when they already have 25 students in each class and they teach classes all day long?”

In one of Mayowa’s classes, students are not required to write a report on the books they read, their grades are based on the number of pages they have read. Yet, writing essays is just the kind of thing that would give Mayowa a worthy challenge.

“But if I, as a teacher, assign papers to 25 kids in three classes,” reasons Yétúndé, ‘how many of them can I grade? People don’t realize that teachers work regular hours and then go home to grade papers and prepare for the next day’s class.”

No Child Left Behind has placed an unprecedented expectation on schools to ensure every child succeeds. More than ever, teachers are having to balance the needs of each student—from those who struggle academically to the talented kids like Mayowa, and all of those in between. Yétúndé recognizes this, but she worries that the law encourages a focus on testing as the sole measure of student success, and that this hamstrings teachers’ ability to individualize their teaching. Focusing on testing “is not the solution to the problem,” she says.

Her point is that while schools must be accountable to federal law and to parents, the reverse is also true. Federal lawmakers—as well as local governments and citizens—have a responsibility to see that public schools get the resources they need to meet the worthy objective of the law. For example, says Yétúndé, give public school teachers classroom aides who can help give that personalized attention that kids need so much to flourish. The way she sees it, accountability in public education shouldn’t only be about scrutinizing whether others have done their part, but about stepping up to share in the responsibility. In this issue of Northwest Education, there are stories about people who step up and demonstrate every day that they can be counted on to do their part—and then some.

—Denise Jarrett Weeks