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 should given the truly terrible way we have done educational accountability. Any company, hospital, or bank faced with similar conditions would have gone out of business within a year or two of being held accountable in the way we do it to schools. The fact that the public school is still standing is in and of itself a remarkable achievement.

Here’s the thing that will surprise a lot of people about the current accountability system: the biggest issue is not testing. In fact, is a colossal error to think it is. Don’t get me wrong: testing is an issue and a contributor to much that is confusing about the system, but testing is a part of a larger accountability system and it is the structure of that larger system that is the problem.

The simplest way to see that is to imagine two systems. In the first, the objective is to shape your organization for the future, to look ahead and consider what benefits your students and their parents expect in an ever-changing world, and to constantly work to deliver more of those benefits going forward to more and more of your students.

In the second, the objective is to repeat this year whatever you did the last time an outside agency deemed you to be compliant by viewing you through a metric. Compliance with that metric is always about the past, so the best way to be compliant going forward is to do what made you compliant in the past. Or what others did to get to compliance.

Those two systems will result in very different organizations. One is an organization focused on the future, where the only guarantee is that in the future it will not be the same organization it is today, but rather, an organization designed to address those future needs. The other will be an organization focused on the past in which change is a dirty word, since change puts compliance with past definitions at risk. Odds are that organization won’t change much at all, or that when it tries to change it will be extraordinarily difficult to do so.

We lag our international peers for a very simple reason: educational accountability as it is currently done insists on compliance with the past. As a result, it discourages change, and most certainly changes that are innovative or transformational, especially among schools deemed non-compliant. Any business or hospital that defined success as simply repeating the past will become irrelevant or obsolete in no time, but what will be obvious there is the formula that set them on a path towards failure. In schools what should be obvious is for some reason generally unseen. Schools have been forced into a backwards-facing accountability based on compliance that makes change almost impossible, rather than a forwards-facing accountability focused on how best to benefit students that insists they change over time in order to best do that.

Unless we solve this accountability problem public schooling will continue down a very clear path towards irrelevance and obsolescence, because as remarkable as the efforts are of educators who try every day to overcome that very bad system, heroic effort can only thwart a bad system for so long, especially given that every few years policy makers make it harder to do so. If we don’t pull our heads out of the sand when it comes to how we do educational accountability, the future of this country is going to be very much at risk, all because of our inability to be honest about what we have done.

It's not too late to prevent that, to put a system in place aimed at the hopes and dreams every student has for their future and every parent for their child. The effect of such a system would be transformational, with all the benefits going towards the students, and in turn, the future of the country. And to be clear, that system doesn't cost billions, doesn't corrupt instructional time with test-based nonsense, and can be done in language that makes sense to every educational stakeholder so that they finally understand and can partner in the education of a community's children. 

Schools now operate in an accountability environment designed to make them worse. That should terrify us. Imagine what would happen if the energy educators spend fighting that bad system was transferred into an accountability that was designed to support them being great. Because that's what we must create. Before it really is too late.