An Educational Contrarian

Someone recently shared an article by a very thoughtful writer who acknowledged that while standardized testing has shortcomings it is nevertheless necessary for understanding something about the quality of our schools. This once again shows that even very smart people have bought into the idea that standardized test scores are an indicator of quality. That is a pervasive fallacy we've been fighting since the invention of a test capable of rank ordering people. The damn psychologists all those years ago were interested in rank ordering because they saw it as a way to confirm their social and racial biases as being based in the notion that they were better than their non-white, non-male peers. They failed to see that the consistency in their results had to do with the fact that society didn't change much while they were doing their work as opposed to repeatedly confirming their stupid, racist, sexist biases. Standardized testing continues to play into the larger narratives of ...

Dear CNN and every other lover of non-scientific polls: I beg you to please realize the degree to which you undermine your mission as organizations committed to objective reporting with such meaningless and un-interpretable data. The sampling required for a scientific poll requires a remarkable art. When someone wants to take the pulse of a group, be it eligible voters, likely voters, neo-Nazis, or parents of two year olds, sampling statisticians go to great lengths to deploy their umpteen degrees and massive intellects to ensure that their results are as valid and reliable as possible. What that means is in layman’s terms is that when a scientific poll is performed two days in a row, the two results would not vary much and can therefore be trusted to reflect the views of the targeted group. That requires the sample to include a mix of people fully representative of the target. Sampling statisticians deploy a wealth of tools, databases, statistical weighting proce...

An organization consists of people, processes, and systems that come together to provide a benefit, without which the organization would have no reason to exist. A huge component of accountability is the measure of how well the organization provided that benefit. When the benefit isn't met then all the parts of the organization may need to change, which means that the accountability measure needs to be useful in that regard. Schools are organizations that exist to produce a benefit for the students that attend them. It would be wonderful to think that accountability measures that have something to do with that benefit might one day be at the heart of accountability discussions. At the moment, the only benefit being rewarded are high or rising standardized test scores, which do not represent the rich benefit I think we all want for our students.