An Educational Contrarian

The headline in my email this morning from Ed Week asked whether it was appropriate to do teacher evaluations in light of the Coronavirus. I wish they would ask the more honest question: is it appropriate to beat up on teachers during the Coronavirus, or should we give it a rest for a year? If the evaluation systems were based on a true accountability, this question wouldn’t exist. The fact that it does, that accountability and teacher evaluation in schools are in fact being put on hold—means that we don’t have anything even close to an effective accountability or evaluation environment. I continue to argue that if it can be put it on hold you have to stop calling it accountability because it isn’t. I would argue the same for evaluations. Education's myopic autopsy-based approach to everything inserts a punishment and punishment avoidance mentality into the process, not a how can we be great mindset that is at the heart of great organizations. As I study accountability in those or...

In this age of the Coronavirus and its overwhelming impact on literally everything, a bright spot in an otherwise ominous cloud is the way we are thinking differently about old problems, rethinking our relationships with each other, and reflecting on what is actually important. We should do the same with educational accountability. And we have a window in which to do it. Of all the problems to rethink, educational accountability should be at the top. For the past two decades (longer in some places) educational accountability has followed the "better autopsy" method for improvement, which will always fail. At the end of a school year the state performs an autopsy (and a partial one at that) and then forces schools to ask, "what could we have done last year to have had a better autopsy last year?" and then whatever the response do that this year. The better autopsy accountability is nonsensical for lots of reasons, but none more so than it will force schools n...