An Educational Contrarian

A good friend recently pointed out that the problems we help educators solve at bravEd are problems of implementation as much as they are problems of what it is school leaders should account for. I agree. I like to think of it like this: every school leader I know wants to implement the right things, but in order for that to happen each school leader needs to account for what they do in such a way that they can be trusted to do those right things. After all, the right things are not always the easiest to see or do. Many decisions can feel contradictory to those outside a school. And because oftentimes a school leader will rightly need to address the latest set of controversies in the popular press in such a way that they will only please some of the stakeholders, trust is the only way for a leader to survive that sort of thing. One other implementation problem my friend pointed out is that organizations that punish non-compliance rather than reward effectiveness are going to kill their...

The challenge in talking about educational accountability is twofold. First is that no one in their right mind would suggest that they are unwilling to be accountable for the work they do, especially when that work is as important as the education of a child. But second, the way accountability has been done in education is so embarrassingly dumb that it isn’t an accountability worth being accountable to or for. That leaves educators in the untenable position of saying that they are happy to be accountable, just not in the way that states and Federal government want them to be accountable. Which leaves educators vulnerable to accusations of wanting to cherry pick among systems for the one that puts them in the best possible light. Or of not wanting to be accountable at all. Let’s be clear about how dumb the current system is. It is something done punitively and authoritatively. It is done to schools by those outside schools, most of whom lack any expertise regarding educational processe...

The recent situation with the Supreme Court is yet another example of what happens when an institution does not address the discipline of accountability appropriately—trust in that institution will suffer mightily. Being able to account for one’s efforts isn’t just a nice to have. Nor is it something ever well done when imposed from the outside (for the obvious reason that the non-technical outsiders are at a serious lack of understanding how best to do accountability within highly technical institutions). Rather, if trust in the institution is a goal that will only come from within a richly wrought accountability discipline, one capable of telling the unvarnished truth to the organization’s stakeholders to the point that it compels trust and actions deemed appropriate in their eyes. And creating that accountability must be the job of the institution. It does amaze me at the arrogance of important organizations (like what the Supreme Court has been absolutely guilty of doing) that put ...

Let's say that policymakers decided it was time to do something about what they perceive to be the poor performance of hospitals run by cities and municipalities. Now, these policymakers are not medical professionals, they don't work in hospitals or have a clue what happens in hospitals, but they apparently stayed in a Holiday Inn Express recently which endowed them with sufficient expertise that whatever policies they put in place can be considered great even absent medical training or input. They create a set of goals, again, no need for input from medical folks, that don’t actually signal effectiveness and draw lots of lines in the sand as to where they’d like hospitals to be without understanding what either the metrics do or if the lines in the sand mean anything. They then assign label to those lines so it will be clear who is and is not failing within their excellent system that they do not understand and that does not mean what they think. They run with those very polic...

Here’s why everyone in the state of Texas should take the most recent accountability ratings provided (or about to be provided) by the Texas Education Agency and drop them in the trash. The state of Texas changed its testing program from 2022 to 2023. It added more items, it added different kinds of items, it appears to have added some extraordinarily difficult items, and it moved the administration entirely online. Whatever your feelings about standardized testing (mine are quite strong as anyone who knows me is aware), the guidelines for how you make this sort of change are crystal clear: you start over. The whole (and only legitimate) point of standardized testing is to create comparability of students via a test instrument, both as of a moment in time and over time. Since the students (and the world around them) are going to obviously change and grow, detecting changes and growth is only possible if the design of the instrument stands still. If the instrument shifts at the same tim...

This week the Texas Education Agency did its annual dump of standardized test scores onto the public. All states are in the process of doing the same. Once again, the rhetoric surrounding this dump (in my state and probably yours) is embarrassingly and dangerously ignorant of what a standardized test is and the limits of its interpretive reach. We might as well release the blood pressure readings of all Americans from the lowest to the highest and then entrust all interpretations to those with no medical training or understanding of what a blood pressure reading means. It’s that ridiculous. Should the medical community speak up, to follow the logic applied to test scores, we should ignore their training and logic, treat them as apologists unwilling to stand up for patients, and act as if our patently false understandings are true. And we should use those data we do not understand to judge the effectiveness of our hospitals and the overall medical community. I wish that were hyperbole, ...

What makes a dollar bill represent some amount of value is that we’ve all come to agree that it does just that. If we universally reached agreement that a dollar bill is meaningless, it would be worth nothing. Perception, it turns out, determines our reality. Thus there’s power in agreeing that something is meaningless because it can render it so. Let’s apply that logic to the Texas Education Agency’s efforts regarding accountability, because the way they do accountability produces results that are entirely meaningless. So we’d really just be doing them a favor. Here’s how you can know that. First, remember that compliance never signals effectiveness. That isn’t something any of us can change. Compliance with FERPA, meeting the requirements for a driver’s license, or passing the food handler’s test at the health department, does not also mean that you are a great school, a great driver, or a great cook. That judgment is elsewhere. On the other hand, you could be a great school, a great...

(Written in response to Children at Risk supporting Commissioner Morath's desire to move the bar on the state accountability ratings such that a school with a similar result two years running will receive significantly different ratings in those years.) I would love to sit down with the Children at Risk Folks and show just how misguided their support of TEA’s “higher standards” is. Let me first agree, however, that we should absolutely and constantly increase our educational capacity to effectively serve children and prepare them for life. Everything is right with that sentiment.   But states run their accountabilities based on compliance, and therein lies the truly catastrophic problem: no amount of compliance has ever made an organization more effective. But you already know that. Almost every driver on the street has complied with the requirements to obtain a driver’s license, but that doesn’t also mean we are a country of continuously improving drivers. Almost every school in A...

Unfortunately for all of us that care about public schools, Children at Risk is back to releasing more of their junk science in the form of school rankings. They use test scores and graduation rates and a few other variables to create what they claim is a more accurate picture of how schools compare than what the state does. Newspapers all over the state just parroted their nonsense. And here’s why its nonsense: they don’t—and this is unfathomable to me given their position as a research and advocacy organization—have a clue what a standardized test is, what the scores mean, or the limitations on their use. They, like so many others, think that once a score exists it is free to be interpreted in any manner convenient to the interpreter. That is bogus. A standardized test score allows a researcher to analyze the differences in total literacy and numeracy attainment between children. However, absent other research, it does not allow for an analysis of what caused that literacy or numerac...

The recent acquisition by HMH of NWEA seems to have been driven by a phenomenally flawed logic: that normative (i.e., standardized, predictive) testing can be tied to instruction. This error that apparently seems so rational on the surface is so fraught with absurdities that it’s hard to imagine—perhaps think of using a fish as a hammer on a ship since they both occupy a spot in the ocean. I wish I were exaggerating, but I can’t think of anything more absurd at the moment—it's the wrong tool for the job by as far as the eye can see. Standardized testing is a highly technical research methodology that sorts students onto a scale for the purpose of analyzing the relative differences between them. That’s a mouthful. Think of it like this: pretend you wanted to analyze height, but the measuring tape hadn’t yet been invented yet. You could still do an analysis by lining everyone up from the shortest to the tallest. From there you can find the average, identify how many steps above or be...