Writing in yesterday's London Times, education correspondent Alexandra Blair reports:

Pupils are to be given a question-by-question breakdown of their GCSE and A-level results over the next fortnight, which could give parents the ammunition to sue schools for poor teaching.... Not only will heads and teachers be able to compare results for questions across year groups, but some fear that parents and pupils will be able to do the same.

Teaching unions have expressed concerns that (one of the country’s largest exam boards) Edexcel’s latest move could be exploited by parents to punish underperforming staff and have called for the information to be used solely for in-school improvements.... Jerry Jarvis, the managing director of Edexcel, admitted that revealing more information could encourage parents to sue schools, but he said that it was crucial that pupils knew whether they had been taught badly.

What is the extent of teachers' responsibility for their students' academic performance?

Professionals such as lawyers, doctors and accountants - and businesses, owe their clients and customers what the common law calls a "duty of care."
 
That duty evolves with the state of the art in technology and best practice. It gets enshrined by case law. If a client is done harm and goes to court, she says in effect that the lawyer, doctor etc, should have behaved differently to meet that standard; that the technology was available and the best practice in use to prevent the harm.

Even before statutory law came to regulate safety, the common law did so. At one time it was permissible not to protect a building against fire, or to put pressure gauges on ships' steam engines. At some point it became unacceptable - and, looking back at the dissemination of technlogy and the evolution of practice, the courts identify that point.

The principle is an important motivating force for advances in the "professions."  Doctors, lawyers and the like have an oblkigation to keep up with the staste of the art. After malfeasance, professional malpractice now amounts to violations of the duty of care and failures to meet its ever rising standards.
 
Teachers have a duty of care in the sense of their physical responsibility for children, but they have never had the duty apply to the core of their purpose as it does for legally recognized professions - indeed that feature is one of the several that distinguish a profession from a trade. Doctors who use technology that was "state of the art" in the Civil War to deal with gunshot wounds are liable for huge damages. K-12 educational institutions are free to use teaching methods from the same era, in no small part because schools developed as institutions of the state, "the king can do no wrong", and maybe because teachers are treated by districts and their own unions as common laborers more than professionals who exercise independent judgment.

There's some very interesting work to be done on the role of the common law duty of care in education in the dissemination of technologial advances - and the barrier that the lack of that duty creates in the pattern of dissemination. There's also some thinking to be done on the legal status of teachers. Are they to be independent professionals with great discretion and so a high level of personal accountability, or mere agents of the state acting under district direction? Are they to be seen by the law as more like lawyers or more like workers on the shop floor? Does the liability for poor student performance go to the teacher or to the school system?

There are quite a few circles to squared here. More later.