An Educational Contrarian

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...