Here to Stay: A Teacher’s 46-year Journey with Accountability in One School Context

This narrative study explores accountability and care in the stories of an exceptional teacher, Marsha Ethridge, who taught more than 46 years in one low-socioeconomic community. While there has been an abundance of research related to teachers’ stories of accountability conducted in the last 20 years, much of it reflects accountability imposed on classrooms through systems of high-stakes testing. In this study, however, multiple perspectives of accountability populate one teacher’s stories. As a new teacher in 1964, Marsha recounted the negative impact of teaching in a time of little formal accountability. From the late 1990s moving forward, however, high-stakes testing had become a constant, sometimes friendly, sometimes oppositional, presence in her school. This analysis of Marsha’s stories extends the work of Noddings to consider face-to-face accountability as an ethical act of caring that leads to transformation and hope