An Educational Contrarian

  A new myth is being perpetuated on the American public and the education community concerning standardized testing: that doing it multiple times a year is better for students and schools than just doing it once. This myth is being furthered under several different labels: progress monitoring, periodic assessments, formative testing, etc., all of which muddy the water. Even worse, the arguments for the myth are almost always arguments in the name of equity. For a moment, forget the names. Let’s use standardized test, since that is a phrase the world is reasonably familiar with. Standardized tests are tests built in partnership with very talented statisticians as comparative instruments. That allows the scores they produce to be used to compare different students to each other as well as compare a student’s score this year to last year. Or in the instance of this latest idea about testing, a score at the beginning of the year to a score at the middle of the year to a score at the e...

It is inexplicable to me how the failed policies of test-based accountability continue to be championed as if they have worked in the past and will continue to work into the future. The position of those espousing the effectiveness of test-based accountability can only be valid if at some point in the past all schools were essentially equal, and then good or bad educators created the disparities between what are now labeled “good” and “bad” schools. Then, the current accountability systems might reflect the efforts of those educators and the judgments would be warranted. Of course, that is a joke. Schools never started at a level playing field. The first time anyone administered a standardized test to the universe of students in America what it showed were the effects of an inequitable society as well as the size and scope of a problem. But it was much easier for Americans to ignore the problem and instead declare that poor children were just dumber than rich children and that the caus...

If you want to know why Americans and their schools tend to lag their international peers, the answer is simple. It has to do with the way educational accountability has been done in America for the past thirty years formally and at least the last fifty informally. Our reliance on a system that was never designed to make any organization great, and in fact was designed not to care about that as an actual goal, continues to be put at the forefront of every accountability conversation without a single critical insight into whether that system can have the results the rhetoric represents. Or our children deserve. Let me be clear that the system is so bad that left to its own devices it should have gutted the American educational system, and the reason it hasn’t is because of tens of thousands of dedicated educators who spend a considerable amount of their time and energy working against its goals in the name of their students. The bottom line is that we have far better schools than we sho...

Let's start with a few basic assumptions. Two choices existed during the pandemic for teaching and learning: Bore the kids with the scripted content in unfamiliar learning environments. Take advantage of the unfamiliar learning environments to engage students in ways those students would find meaningful.  Only one of those choices was presented as a viable option by the powers that be. What should be obvious to all of us is that as educators we have students in our presence for a limited time and we should take advantage of every minute. Guidelines are of course useful and necessary in helping us do that, while a script to be followed under any circumstances would not be. Scripts don't understand context and used uncritically will create inefficiencies and certainly fail to take advantage of the limited time we have. What about when times aren't normal? What are the consequences of sticking to the script during a pandemic when everything we thought we knew about the script ...

Organizations can shape themselves to best serve their stakeholders, the members of the group without whom the organization loses its reason to exist, or someone else. Perhaps those in the organization. Or perhaps those outside the organization who hold power and sway over it. Either way, the choice would result in very different organizations. A hospital built entirely to ease the lives of medical staff will look and feel very different than one designed entirely to ease the pain of patients. What looks like a choice between patients and doctors isn’t really a choice—choose the doctors at the expense of the patients and the patients will go elsewhere. It’s easy to imagine parallels in grocery stores, restaurants, tech companies, online retailers, and most certainly schools. Of course, organizations do try and strike a balance. Which is understandable because workers should be treated well, but also something we should be aware lest that balance stray too far from the stakeholder. If w...

Let’s finally be done with high stakes testing and the accountability charade that gets wrapped around it every year. Accountability requires the truth to work. If you tell me I’m effective or ineffective and that’s the truth I can improve. If you’re wrong, however, you’ll do more harm than good. You’ll put me at risk of changing what may not need to be changed and not changing what should. Accountability in organizations is no different. Only the truth about both the good and the bad allows for meaningful improvement. The public school system is perhaps the most important of our public institutions when it comes to the future of this country and the preservation of our democracy. If it fails, we fail. Of all our institutions that must account for and be accountable for the truth, schools are paramount. Which means they must have the truth. Which, since the era of test-based accountability began, has not existed. This may come as a surprise to most, but the tests states use in what the...