An Educational Contrarian

The question in the title to this blog has been posed to me twice in the last week, which I think is due to states releasing their accountability judgments of schools just before the kids all come back. Common sense might suggest that only an idiot would say no. I'm not an idiot (according to most people I meet) but I'm here to say that we'll do more harm than good if we oversimplify our responses and just say, "sure." First, we need to identify what we mean by a best teacher . I can do that easily. A best teacher is one who can maximize an educational benefit for the children in his or her classroom. We could get even more specific if we wanted and say that the best teacher for a child is the one who can maximize the benefit for that specific child, but for the sake of the argument here, lets keep it general: a best teacher is one who can maximize the educational benefit for children. Second, we need to identify what we mean by our most challenging school...

Just because someone offers you a snake oil cure for how to improve the quality of public schools doesn’t mean you have to swallow it. In fact, you shouldn’t. The latest snake oil cure in Texas is school accountability via school grades. I know a good bit about school accountability—I make a living from the topic and have a deep-seated belief that true accountability is both necessary and achievable. And that snake oil isn’t the answer. It’s easy to see the snake oil for what it is if you back up and ask a simple question: how does accountability work in successful organizations? I’ve explored the answer for years, written a book and a bunch of articles on the topic, and now work with schools to put in place what I’ve discovered. The answers to the question reveal the difference between a false accountability that will miss every policy goal it claims to support, and a true accountability that can move an organization in a desired direction. I’ll mention three principles of true ...

Education Commissioner Morath in the great state of Texas is about to release grades for schools. His quote: " The idea that the design of the system was meant to highlight both high levels of student achievement and high levels of educator impact makes this essentially the fairest system in the history of the state of Texas." (Article by Julie Chang in the Austin American Statesman, August 7, 2018--see it here --italics are mine.) The claim in italics is bogus. And it is easy for anyone to see why. Think of what it means to assess a student. You can do that by imagining the full range of assessment done to create understanding regarding a student or a school as a large sphere, with many layers to it. Trying to understand all the complexity to properly assess student or school needs and assign appropriate judgments is a constant, on-going thing. It requires trained teachers, lots of effort and energy, and proximity to the students being assessed. Tests are, by design...

Formal standards standardize something. It is useful to standardize some things, such as electrical outlets, allowable car emissions, and the minimum requirements to become a doctor, lawyer, or nurse. Standardizing the outlet means that any electrical device with a compliant plug will fit, regardless of who manufactured either of them. Standardizing allowable car emissions helps keep the air clean. Standardizing minimum requirements to enter certain professions is intended to ensure a basic level of quality and protect citizens from those selling snake oil. It should be noted that the standards that exist in the world have a profound impact on each of our daily lives. I can go to any gas station and know that the gas nozzle will fit in my car, rather than having to find a Honda nozzle for my Honda car. I can buy a car and trust it will meet federal standards regarding emissions. I can go to the doctor and know that at the very least they met the compliance requirements to be a doctor...

It is a natural thing to seek out messages that confirm our preexisting beliefs or ideas about the world and other people. It is also fairly common to interpret unclear messages in a manner favorable to the beliefs or ideas we hold. However, just because it is natural or common does not mean it is also good or right. It is not—in fact, just the opposite. The tendency to seek out confirming messages is called confirmation bias. The trouble with confirmation bias is that it always risks replacing the truth with what we might want to hear. Any resulting action then risks being the wrong action when the truth is considered, while appearing to be the right action given the bias. It allows any judgment and subsequent action to appear and feel appropriate, while it may be entirely wrong given the underlying realities. Our preexisting beliefs or ideas can occur from a dizzying array of possibilities, can be subtle or blatant, and can be sexist or racist. They may resonate from surface rese...

True Accountability is arguably the most important concept for every public school to embrace if the purpose of schooling is to maximally benefit each and every student. True Accountability represents a significant mind shift from what currently passes for educational accountability, which is anything but a meaningful accountability. True Accountability is far richer, far deeper, and far more robust. It demands real leadership, it places student benefit front and center, and is about moving a school closer to the goal of maximally benefitting each and every student. That goal represents an ideal to strive for that requires constant effort. A truly accountable leader regularly offers up an objective accounting regarding their area of responsibility and is able to move his or her organization from that point in a desirable direction. In the case of schools, that direction is towards an organization more capable of maximizing student benefit. A truly accountable leader understands that ac...

Several people forwarded a Seth Godin blog on forced rankings. See it here . I’ll add two cents to the conversation. A forced ranking in education is: 1) is useful for some types of limited analysis; 2) has no capacity to offer a valid judgment, and 3) if used as a judgment tool almost always falls into the trap of a confirming an existing bias rather than reflecting the truth. Ironically, they are rarely used for analysis. Their most common usage in education is to confirm what people already (often wrongly) believe. First, its limited usefulness: a ranking (or ordering) can be useful for detecting patterns in single traits where very little information is actually available (when lots of information is available it is far better to use other, more nuanced tools). Once a researcher forces a ranking he/she can search for patterns within that single trait. Some of those patterns may need to be undone. A salary differential between men and women, for example, would be one such pattern. A...

Items are selected for tests according to the test’s purpose. If a teacher is building a unit test from scratch he/she will build items that reflect what they needed students to learn, and the expectation would be that most of the students would answer the majority of them at least partially correct if they paid attention at all: it would be rare that a student who was at least partially present would score a zero. We say that those items signal the learned/not learned moment. The statistics behind those items are not particularly important—an important item that all students answered correctly would signal good teaching and learning, while one they all answered incorrectly would signal the opposite. The point here is to assess learning . Researchers interested in analyzing people have long known that if you can order human beings on a human trait or characteristic you can detect patterns to explore. In the case of negative patterns, such as an ordering that shows women generally mak...

Texas experienced some computer glitches today administering the state testing program (the system shut down for a little more than an hour). A superintendent friend wrote me a note asking about the potential impact on the reliability of the results. I'm posting below what I wrote to him. -------------- Reliability refers to (among other things) the kids doing about the same on parallel tests—but that assumes similar conditions for each test. The conditions for this test compared to another would be different given the interruption—therefore it is reasonable to suspect that the results would differ. For example, kids who tried hard before the break may think that the grownups don’t care enough to create a system that works and not take the part after the break seriously—you could see that by comparing scores before and after to see if effort decreased. If it did, then that definitely affects the reliability of the scores, since they would very likely perform differently on a ...

Kristi Hassett, a trustee in Flower Mound Texas posed the following via Twitter: Many ed reformers want schools to run like businesses. @testsensejt, I wonder what an Industrial Engineer would say about our current testing & accountability regime. What would they look at to determine value? What would they conclude? My response is a smidge long for a tweet, but the question is a good one and the answer goes right to the heart of the matter: People in organizations are generally accountable for the quality and efficacy of their decisions, as judged by a supervisor. Organizations are generally held accountable via market forces, and failure via the market generally signals bad decisions by its people. This is true whether you’re a non profit or an engineering firm. Current school accountability pretends to have invented a competitive market by which to judge schools and then presumes that the position of a school in the market signals the quality of decisions. This is flawed ...

Policy makers continue to set forth choice and charters as the cure-all for what ails education. I can argue the fallacies behind that thinking until I’m blue in the face. However, in this blurb all I want to make clear are the simple economics of the thing. The economic argument alone, I believe, is enough to cause us to rethink the entire charter enterprise. Imagine within a community it costs five dollars a year to educate each general education student. That would be an average. Some students would cost more, and some would cost less, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify the actual costs for a particular student. Now imagine you are someone motivated by profiting from public school dollars and you open a charter to do that. Like the public school, you would be given five dollars for each student who comes to your school. If all the kids who come to your school cost more than five dollars to educate, your business would fail—you would either spend what was...

Last week Texas Commissioner of Education, Mike Morath, again stated his belief that all students can pass each STAAR test and therefore all students and all schools can be successful within the accountability program he is designing. His argument is this: STAAR is a criterion-referenced test, not a norm-referenced test, and thus all kids can pass it. When a friend of mine in attendance questioned this, Commissioner Morath acknowledged some superintendents did not believe this was the case and declared it a “difference of opinion.” When it comes to the world of educational testing and educational accountability, I’m something of a testing and accountability expert. I’ve worked in that world for the better part of my career. I’ve written a book and a number of articles specifically about what such tests were designed to do (which is far more limited than most people think). I’ve read a ton by others way smarter than me on the subject whose work has helped inform my understandings, and...