Accountability goes up.

Responsibility goes down.

If you want to understand why American schools are weak, you have to grasp the fundamental difference between the language we use and the language we should be using, between what we do, and what we should be doing. Accountability means students are subjected to their teachers, teachers subjected to managers (their principals), managers are subjected to administrators, and administrators are subjected to congeries of local/state/federal politicians and a web of nonsensical, contradictory laws.

Responsibility goes down. Responsibility puts the needs of students first. Responsibility turns the tables by making teachers/managers/administrators accountable to their students.

In other words, our education system goes the wrong way. If it was about students and their learning, everything, and I mean everything about the system, would have a downward trajectory, a culture of responsibility for the students.

Think about that when you hear politicians, and President Bush is a prime example with his No Child Left Behind pet project, use the language of accountability, which ultimately means he wants education to be accountable to him, the guy sitting at the very top. Never is the language of responsibility employed.

We have it all upside down. We have it all backwards.

I have no idea about what goes on in Finland, but I am a product of America's public schools. I have taught in public schools, and now as an aspiring scholar whose primary interest is writing pedagogy, I can confidently assert that the main problem with American public schools is that we have it upside down. We have it backwards.

Arbitrary rules abound in the effort to control students (as opposed to setting them free). Recite The Pledge of Allegiance. Cut your hair. Make sure your shorts touch the right spot on your leg. Guys, take out that earring. Girls, cover up that midriff. On and on and on, the sea of arbitrary rules that have little to do with learning, but everything to do with control. And that's just the obvious, surface-level stuff. It goes so much deeper. It is so much worse than that.

Standardized tests proliferate. Standardized tests teach nothing, absolutely nothing, yet students are subjected to them, more and more of them every year, and supreme importance is placed on them as if they do teach something, sucking away valuable class time that could be spent learning. And why? Standardized tests measure. They translate learning into a cold number, and those cold numbers are needed because we have an educational culture of accountability. Everything, except learning, goes up. Simply put: Standardized tests should have no presence, literally zero presence, in education, because they do not teach anything but conformity and fear. The needs of the student, and his/her learning, are not even in the conversation.

Reading scholar Frank Smith wrote, and I'm paraphrasing, that you have to take a child to school to make him/her hate learning. He absolutely nailed it. Children are natural born learners, sponges, who soak up every bit of information, every bit of experience, ever morsel of language, they encounter. And when it comes to language, children are natural born language learners and users. If they are provided with plenty of textual materials to stimulate them, and if they encounter those materials in a nurturing, comfortable environment, reading comes as naturally as walking. It takes a teacher standing in the way, with tests, with rules, with prescribed pedagogical practice, that makes reading difficult for children. Children want to learn. They need to learn. It takes a teacher, held accountable instead of responsible, to make learning difficult.

As a writing teacher, I’ve seen my students flourish when I removed the arbitrary rules, when I de-emphasized Standard Written English and instead emphasized the world of possible discourses, the myriad ways in which students can experiment with language and have fun doing it. When the pressure of stifling rules is lessened, when students can make choices for themselves, they flourish. They learn.

If you want students to do better in science the same principle applies. You introduce them to the scientific method, and you turn them loose. You have them devise and execute their own experiments. You have them apply the scientific method in their own unique ways, and you stand back and watch as learning becomes fun and engaging. What you don’t do is have them memorize the method and regurgitate it back to you on a test. The only thing that teaches is that learning is pure drudgery.

Again, I have no idea what goes on in Finland, but if their education system is superior to ours, I would bet my next paycheck they take responsibility for their students there. They make learning fun. They give students a nurturing place to learn, and they keep the arbitrary rules to a minimum. They get out of the way as much as they can, and they watch learning flourish.

If you take one thing out of this piece, I hope it is an understanding that, fundamentally, our education system goes the wrong way, emphasizes all the wrong things, and it places the needs of the student in a distant second to the needs of administrators to prove something to the bureaucrats who control the purse strings. Accountability goes up. Responsibility goes down. We have it upside down. We have it backwards.