An Educational Contrarian

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...