In your country, how are governments held responsible for the promises they make on education?
How big a role do private companies have in education in your country? Is anyone holding them to account?
Do you think it’s fair for teachers to be evaluated based on student test results?
We’ve just launched a brief survey (Spanish/French) because we want to know what you think about these sorts of questions. Your answers will feed into our next annual report, which focuses on Accountability in Education. We will be exploring who is responsible for providing equitable and quality education and how they communicate about what they are doing to carry out their responsibilities. Most importantly, we’re looking at whether what they do, and how they communicate about it, helps to ensure the provision of good quality education for all.
We’re interested in everyone’s views because we think everyone has a role to play – teachers, principals, students, parents, professors, government officials, private sector providers, civil society, the international community – as well as people who have been to school and people who have never been to school!
Teachers, what activities are you responsible for in addition to your teaching responsibilities? How much of your time is taken up with administrative issues?
Students, have you ever been asked to evaluate your teachers? Or the quality of your school meals? Did your evaluation make a difference?
Parents, how effective are parent-teacher meetings for finding out about your child’s learning?
We want to hear from people all around the world.
Your views and opinions count! Please help inform our next GEM Report by completing the survey here.
Do tests reflect student learning and capabilities?
The fashionable trend is to rail against testing and say no because children surely know a lot more. But tests require instant and effortless retrieval. So if students “know” something and retrieve it an hour later or do it too slowly to fit into working memory, it’s the same as if they don’t know it the opportunity to use it passes.
The same thing happens in real life. We either can read an understand a sign or not. We can either guesstimate unit prices when comparing items in a store or not. All this means that someone should be accountable at teaching basic skills to fluency and automaticity. There is a chain to choose from. Let the readers think about this.