An Educational Contrarian

 Two questions should sit at the heart of every conversation about public schools: What is the job of a public school? How can the legislature best support schools in doing that job? To understand the job of any organization we must start with a simple reality: the people inside the organization do not ultimately define its purpose. That role belongs to the organization’s primary stakeholders — the people who stand to benefit directly from its work. For a hospital, that means patients. For an architecture firm, it means clients who need buildings designed. For schools, it means students — and, by extension, the adults responsible for them. People outside an organization define its purpose through their own experience and expectations, and they decide how to engage with that organization through that lens. Organizations can describe their mission however they choose, but it is the perception of those they serve that most shapes how they are understood in the world. So, what is the ...

I have some big questions for those who still believe our current model of educational accountability has any real value: Why is education the only field where policymakers pretend compliance equals effectiveness? That’s like saying, “all teachers passed a criminal background check, so they must be great teachers.” Why is education the only field where we judge an entire organization based on an important but narrow slice of what happens inside it? Accountability is supposed to be to all the things that matter, as that is the precursor to trust. Why is education the only field where “accountability” is entirely top down, treating the local context as irrelevant? And why is education the only field where the organizations in wealthy neighborhoods are all but guaranteed to get mostly good marks, while the organizations in poor neighborhoods and all but guaranteed to get bad ones, and we act like that’s okay? In any other profession such a system would be tossed out and those supporting i...

One of the most effective—and unsettling (because it was so manipulative)—advocacy efforts I’ve ever witnessed took place during the 1994 midterm elections. A year or so earlier, Newt Gingrich and his political action committee distributed a memo to Republican candidates across the country. It contained two simple lists: one of words that tested positively in focus groups, and one of words that tested negatively. Gingrich urged Republican candidates to use the positive terms when describing themselves and their policies, and to use the negative terms when describing Democrats, regardless of the underlying realities. The candidates followed the advice with remarkable discipline. The result? Over time, values like “family,” “responsibility,” and “strength” became synonymous with the Republican brand, no matter who invoked them. I recall Democratic leaders who had long championed those same ideals suddenly finding themselves on the defensive—as if the words no longer belonged to them. On ...

I’m genuinely relieved that the through-year testing bill failed in Texas. And just to be clear—that’s not because I’m a fan of STAAR, or because I subscribe to the tired claim that we can’t understand how schools are doing without standardized testing. Nor is it only because the Senate’s version of the bill handed even more power to an unelected commissioner already running roughshod over public education (though that’s certainly part of it). The real issue runs deeper. This was a debate about which standardized test is best for accountability, without asking the most fundamental question: Can any standardized test—regardless of how often it’s given—accurately determine the quality of a school? The answer is unequivocally no. When we argue that one version of this sort of testing is better than another, we trap ourselves in a false choice. Well-intentioned folks may feel they’re pushing for progress, but they’re really just reinforcing the same flawed structure with different packagin...

Texas just released more of its school grading nonsense. I imagined myself in a Q&A situation. This was done with my home state in mind, but this applies much more broadly. It is way too long for a blog, but it needs to be somewhere. 1. What is a standardized test like the ones used by Texas to create its ratings designed to show? Surprisingly little. Standardized testing is a methodology that allows a researcher to observe the patterns in a population of students relative to a defined domain. So, for example, if students in some neighborhoods have more of the domain than in others. Its genius is that it does this without ever asking or knowing how much of the domain any student possesses. No one can measure the amount of literacy any student possesses—just as you can’t measure the amount of humor, cleverness, or grit any student possesses. But it is possible to observe when a student has more or less of a trait than their peers. That is a tiny bit of information, but it is enough ...

It is an understatement here in early 2025 to suggest that public education is under assault. At both the federal and state levels there seems to be this perverse desire to do away with one of our most democratizing of institutions. In the past when I criticized such efforts I was arguing against a hypothetical future, but no more. The future is here and those of us who care about public education had better figure out what to do about it. I have appreciated any number of writers giving voice to the positives that might emerge, particularly those who write in my own field of accountability studies. Their optimism is much needed. But I am also concerned in that literally every article or opinion I have read is encouraged by the chance to finally measure what matters. It is that sentiment toward measurement that concerns me. The idea seems to be that we picked the wrong things to measure , or not enough things, and that should we be measuring different things we might finally be able ...