Learning to Teach in an Age of Accountability.

LEARNING TO TEACH IN AN AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY

By Arthur T. Costigan And Margaret Smith Crocco, With Karen Kepler Zumwalt. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.

New teachers enter the profession and immediately face countless challenges, from public school overcrowding to recalcitrant students to a severe lack of resources. Arthur T. Costigan and Margaret Smith Crocco's Learning to Teach in an Age of Accountability seeks to give them a hand by preparing them for what they will find as well as offering coping strategies.

The book responds to persistent right-wing attempts to use "accountability" as a buzzword for standards that curb teacher autonomy, innovation, and child-centered practices. The authors re-establish the idea of accountability as responsibility for one's own actions, and in this case, classrooms and students. They reclaim the word with the stories of teachers who have faced obstacles successfully, and seek to prepare potential teachers with a reassuring and sympathetic tone; this is the kind of book that includes a chapter about having a personal life while building a teaching career.

To depict the various experiences of urban teaching, Costigan and Crocco draw from their own experiences in education and interviews with new teachers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The preface stresses that this book is not, however, like so many other accounts of young, White (the authors capitalize all race names) teachers working in urban schools. Instead, it follows its interviewees considering the accountability they feel for their actions instead of simply recounting stories of arduous times. Even so, there is quite a bit of the Up The Down Staircase sort of anecdote in the beginning of the book.

Costigan and Crocco face the somewhat sobering realities that intimidate the new teacher. They describe the lack of diversity among teachers; teachers who feel undermined by standardized curricula that leave them with little choice; teacher shortages; daunting teaching certification programs; friends and family who don't support the choice to be a teacher; fear of working in urban schools; difficulty of dealing with parents; and the wearing factor of what the authors term the "dailiness" of teaching.

Things take a more positive tone when the authors begin to move from railing against the current state of teaching in public schools to describing what the profession is actually like. They offer narratives of urban teaching life gleaned from interviews with teachers, and the authors seem to respect the teachers whose experiences they recount. "We are inspired by the clever and creative ways in which they negotiate the challenges they face," the authors write. "We hope that you, too, will be stimulated to think proactively and intelligently about your future in teaching, that you will stay the course, and that you will become a mature, highly competent, lifelong, and proud teacher." It's tough to remain uninspired after a rallying cry like this.

Throughout the book, the authors maintain their belief in their readers, as if they are already addressing the sympathetic urban teachers they hope to inspire. The result is a textbook with questions at the end of chapters called "Responding to the Issues," and the constant reaffirmation that there are no right answers.

The generously excerpted interviews throughout the book add some of the liveliest moments. The candor in these interviews is bracing when compared with some of the equivocating tones that the authors need to take to cover all the bases. One teacher is quoted as saying, "The thing with kids is, once you've sort of let them take over your life and they are there all the time, it's much harder to step back, and then all of a sudden say, no you can't be here all the time." Another adds that "I expected to go in there and be Mr. Nice Guy and Mr. Funny Guy and expect it to go well. You know, and it did for the first couple of weeks until they realized that you're kind of a doormat that they can kind of walk all over. Then I realized I need to get a lot stricter."

The realism captured by the conversations is sometimes almost painfully palpable: "Many new teachers spend a very restless Sunday night. In all likelihood they are thinking of what happened last week, or what they might do in class on Monday morning when the bell rings," the authors write. Teachers, Costigan and Crocco argue, tend to worry that everything that happens in the classroom is entirely their responsibility. They help alleviate this anxiety by dealing with issues that prey upon new teachers on those harried Sunday nights, such as the fear that they are violating the old saw "Don't smile until Christmas."

Zumwalt's essay, the last chapter of the book, may be its most useful section. She moves beyond lamenting the condition of schools to suggest some coping mechanisms. Her chapter is part effective pep talk, like much of the book. More important, however, she reminds future teachers to work with what they have: "Throwing up one's hands, moving to a different school or grade-level, or leaving teaching might be appropriate responses in some cases. However, to advance these as the only reactions short of changing state and federal testing requirements leaves me with the unsettled feeling that I would just be compounding the problem."

Zumwalt, who teaches at Columbia's Teacher's College, emphasizes the autonomy that even new teachers have as one great advantage of education. For example, instead of teaching sentence diagramming all semester to students facing a standardized grammar test, Zumwalt used her own methods to teach grammar, then did a "crash course directly teaching the parts of speech" in the months before the test. Her method worked, and her students performed well. Her story emphasizes the importance of accountability, once she made herself responsible for her students' success by using her own process.

For teachers who don't have the freedom Zumwalt did, she makes the important point that even the teachers whose innovations in the classroom were curtailed or banned by administrators were making decisions about their own students, and were still accountable. Her other hopeful note is that teachers need not feel hemmed in by a preset curriculum if they follow her idea of an "enacted curriculum," which is what happens when the curriculum hits an individual classroom where it can flourish with a teacher who tailors and explores it according to her understanding of her own students. Here, accountability becomes an opportunity rather than a punishment.

Learning to Teach in an Age of Accountability provides would-be teachers and those already in the trenches with some much-needed enthusiasm and advice. Accountability, it turns out, is not simply a politically loaded phrase to force teachers to do more with less, but a way for teachers to recapture their own classrooms on more of their own terns.

But this book suffers from some of the same problems as the schools it describes: lack of resources and overcrowding. More judicious editing and less of an attempt to cover all topics related to teaching in challenging urban schools might have made for a more manageable read. Even so, the book performs well as starting point for any prospective teacher. With its real-life anecdotes and wide range of classroom strategies, it demonstrates that no educational task is too daunting to confront. It could also give a jaded teacher new hope and a new outlook. Like any good teacher, the reader of this book just needs a little patience.