|
Finally, but foremost in teachers' minds, students themselves are a central element in the particular challenge of the high schools. They play multiple roles in the process and products of standards-based accountability: they are the bottom line and the intended beneficiaries, a resource and a result (see Chabrán in this volume). High schools differ in critical ways from elementary schools, not simply in the early hour at which the school day begins, or the larger size of physical and organizational structures; they are full of adolescents, and the interactions between teachers and teenagers are quite different from those with younger children. High school students are not like younger students who “can be compelled to perform, ” explained a music teacher, who splits his time between teaching elementary and high school classes. Instead, as young adults they see a teacher as “more like a peer, ” so that “[teachers] have to earn their respect” and students have to be “convinced” that there is a reason to engage in schoolwork. Nor, a principal observed, are high school students quite like adults: “they don't react like us.”
Yet high school students are making-and see themselves as old enough to make-important choices about what they need to know, and what they are willing to do: they decide which schools to attend, which days to come (or cut), whether to stay in school or drop out, what courses they will take, and how much effort to put into an exhausting battery of state tests. Some, perhaps aspiring lawyers, elect to study English and social studies, but plan to hire accountants to deal with the math problems in their lives. Others know, or think they know, that they will be musicians or mechanics and that they do not need academic courses at all. Some even organize boycotts, or create websites in opposition to high-stakes tests. They are old enough to ask why, and to demand and deserve a meaningful answer. With remarkable consistency across the states and types of schools, whether or not the stakes are high, teachers and administrators struggle with ways to convince and connect to adolescents, with what we have called the “mystery of motivation” (Siskin and Lemons 2000). How to motivate high school students to engage in academic work has always been difficult to some degree, but it poses a particular challenge under the demands of standards-based accountability, when all students are expected to achieve high standards in all tested subjects-and teachers search for convincing answers to why everyone needs to know the quadratic formula, or how to write a five-paragraph essay. At its core, the design of an effective accountability system depends heavily on the answers it can provide, on the motivation of students and the meaning they attach to what they are expected to achieve. The assessments rely on a set of critical conditions: that students actively engage in the effort, attend their classes, show up to take the exams, and take the tests seriously. Achieving those conditions, in turn, depends on convincing students they have reason to participate and a reasonable chance of success-which entails schools organized to prepare them, qualified and committed teachers to educate them, community consensus on what the next generation needs to know, and the political will to provide the particular resources to make that possible in every school. As standards-based accountability reform enters the era of second generation revisions, those conditions remain a challenge for high schools, and the high school remains a challenge to the reform movement.
|
