Want to know why American children lag behind our international peers? Because we are idiots when it comes to school accountability
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...