An Educational Contrarian

Definition of Accountability Organizations consist of people, processes, and systems. Each organization exists to produce a benefit, value, or usefulness to those outside the organization. This can be a product for customers, profitability to shareholders, or a service. Accountability connects the degree to which the benefit, value, or usefulness did or did not occur to the people, processes, and systems. An accountability system ultimately assigns cause and responsibility to people. Definition of Accountability System An Accountability System is a change engine. It looks objectively at the degree to which the benefit, value, or usefulness is accomplished and generates findings that must be acted upon. An accountability system is not a reporting system per se, but much more. Reporting systems elevated to accountability systems risk judgments of success or failure that have nothing to do with the benefit, value, or usefulness it is an organization’s job to provide.

A good friend sent this knowing I'd be interested. I was. My response is below. https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/top-college-rankings-list-2017-us-news-investigation/ Hi George— Thanks for sharing. Tons of connections. I’m long been suspicious of educational “standards,” those laundry lists of content states put out, and what that implies about education: education is about learning “stuff.” However, that “stuff” is based on what elites can most easily learn, providing them a distinct advantage over non-elites. As long as “stuff” remains at the core of what is to be taught, I fear that will have the effect of furthering what the author talks about. And once again, a gesture that elites can claim to be about equity is anything but. I started expressing this set of thoughts about six months ago using the graphic below (I don’t think I’ve shown this to you): When success occurs among non-elites from very poor backgrounds it seems not to occur because they somehow ...