Leader ship 4 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Leader ship 4 - Essay Example Given the responsibility charged to our leaders, morality and ethics are two aspects that they should really observe. They act as an example, and it is from the leaders that the society will derive their actions and intentions. However, most leaders especially from the financial fields are usually obsessed with financial gains than any other achievement. It is always about profit making even if it means subjecting the workers to bad and unhealthy working conditions such as what happened in the Manchester during the Industrial revolution. However, leaders like these have always responded to this point by quoting purpose; that the purpose of business is to make a profit. What really drive leaders to put social responsibility and ethics second to profit is usually greed and selfness. They seek self-fulfillment that is always hard since wants are insatiable. Successful leaders like Shackleton ensured that profit is used for social security and promotion of ethics in the society (Mackay & Mackay n.p). Proper leaders would otherwise seek to do something more to the society, and if money comes, so be it. The team members should take the responsibility of making ethical moves when a leader behaves unethically. This does not entail whistle blowing, but they should approach the matter more subtly as they seek to make the leader understand. Otherwise, moral responsibility of the team members should not be compromised, as well as their right to make things right (Mackay & Mackay n.p). Adequate measures should be taken, in accordance to the law, if the leader fails to obey the subtle call made, by the team members, to review his or her habits. This could be seeking the intervention of a more senior authority or the law which is usually the utmost leader in our societies. As a leader, serving a team is usually a challenge. A team involves a group of people who have come together in order to

Ratings In Schools And Accountability Systems Research Paper

Ratings In Schools And Accountability Systems - Research Paper Example Administrators also feel pressure when accountability systems are adopted. They report that they must spend additional hours defending their schools' competitive standing with parents, teachers, and the media--hours that they once spent more productively. In response to these worries and pressures, educators also begin to adjust the focus of their efforts. Their curricula and teaching efforts become more standardized and superficial. Moreover, since they want their schools to look well on competitive tests, they tend to restrict instruction to the topics assessed by those tests. A sad example of how this process works was recently described by sociologists Jere Gilles, Simon Geletta, and Cortney Daniels. In 1993 the State of Missouri created an accountability program designed around a new assessment instrument, the Missouri Mastery Achievement Test. This test was tied to a new curriculum that had been developed by the state's department of education, and all schools were required to administer it so that it could be used as a "report card"--letting the public know how well their own schools were doing compared with others in the state. As Gilles and his colleagues describe the outcome, results of this. Quality programs and textbooks were scrapped in order to replace them with materials that directly taught the test, and an unholy competition emerged between districts and communities over test scores. In some districts a week or more of instructional time each year was devoted to this test.... scrapped in order to replace them with materials that directly taught the test, and an unholy competition emerged between districts and communities over test scores. In some districts a week or more of instructional time each year was devoted to [preparing for] this test (Gabbard 67). Moreover, this was not an isolated incident. As testing specialist George Madaus has suggested, when you have high-stakes tests, the tests eventually become the curriculum. It happened with the Regents exams in New York. Items that are not emphasized in the testare not emphasized in school. That's a fundamental lesson that cuts across countries and across time. Teaching has not changed that much; it's an art form. Given basically the same set of circumstances, teachers will behave in much the same way. . . . But if you go to Europe, to the British Isles, or to Australia and look at comparable literature, [worries about] the external achievement exams . . . appear often. And they write about cramming, about how they prepared for the exams. They write about how, after taking the exams, they purged their minds of the answers that they had learned (Gabbard 59). Somehow, we doubt that most Americans are interested in promoting school learning that is narrow, test-specific, standardized superficial, and easily forgotten--but that is exactly what accountability programs promote. It also takes a great deal of time and money to conduct accountability programs. According to a leading scholar, Arthur Wirth, citing the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy, mandatory testing in America now "consumes annually some 20 million school days and the equivalent of $700 and $900 million in direct and indirect expenditures." What this means, of course, is that schools regularly shortchange