Lacking Accountability, Doing Just Fine

A Teacher's First Classroom—50 Years Ago

By Sidney Trubowitz

The air is filled with talk of teacher accountability. The cry is for good teachers to be rewarded and bad teachers to be tossed out of classrooms, based on student achievement assessed by scores on standardized tests.

These persistent soundings about accountability and test results have caused me to look back to the beginning of my own career in education more than 50 years ago, when I was an elementary school teacher in New York City. How did I perform as a new teacher? How was I evaluated? What pressures had an impact on me? How did standardized-test scores affect me? How did the absence of strict accountability measures influence what I did?

I was 24 years old then and had much to learn about myself and teaching. I had passed a test to become a “common branches” teacher and was assigned to Public School 154, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens. My 4th grade class...