How to render TEAs terrible accountability system moot
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 driver, or a great cook, and have failed all three compliance tests. One is not a marker for the other.
Thus if someone tries to pass compliance off as effectiveness you should reject any resulting judgments as invalid, dumb and naïve.
Second, remember what a standardized test does: a standardized test is a research instrument that provides estimates of how students compare to each other at a moment in time within a subject domain. That just means that the test positions students somewhere along a continuum, from the student furthest below average to the student furthest above. That’s useful for a researcher to know, because when other research is laid on top of the continuum they can observe patterns they might not be able to otherwise see.
But on their own standardized test scores are pretty useless because absent more research you can’t see what caused a student to land where they do. And if you can’t observe a cause, you don’t have anything to judge. That’s pretty simple logic, but ignorance has long prevailed, and the world continues to believe that high test scores are always a sign of effective schools, and low test scores are a sign of failure. That leads to some embarrassingly bad conclusions.
For example, if a school is filled with students who would likely have high scores no matter the school they attended we’re at risk of declaring it good with no evidence for the judgment, thus awarding it a participation trophy. But if it is filled with students who are likely to struggle no matter the school they attend, why then that school is a failure as are those who choose to work in a challenging environment. In a lot of those schools, given the neighborhoods they tend to be in, we’d be at risk of writing off the students and the neighborhoods as unteachable, dooming them with a false but self-fulfilling prophecy.
To summarize: standardized test scores have never, will never, and can never serve on their own as an indicator of effectiveness. Thinking otherwise is bad for everybody.
Which creates a double whammy when it comes to accountability. When compliance combines with the misuse of a research instrument it becomes surprisingly hard to see, but see it we must: when results that on their own cannot signal effectiveness are shoved into a compliance formula that can’t identify effectiveness, the result is at best invalid, but more likely dead wrong. Any pretense that a school judgment derived from such a convoluted mess is meaningful is a joke.
The result: Texas spends a hundred and some odd million dollars a year on an accounting system that has zero capacity to account for the effectiveness of a school. Across the country that number is in the billions.
The absurdity in that would be laughable, except that the stakes are so high. In Texas, Commissioner Morath, the governor, and the senate love the negative attention the invalid judgments bring because it serves their larger agendas: vouchers, privatization, etc.
And now Morath wants to make it even harder to comply by shifting the compliance lines which never signaled effectiveness in the first place. Which he is disingenuously claiming is good for Texas students (how can something that is meaningless be good for anybody?). Except all it will do is let him portray public schools in a more negative light than before, furthering the agenda of a small minority, while leaving the entire world completely ignorant as to where Texas schools are and are not yet as effective as they should be.
So let’s discount all of that. Let’s ignore the speciousness in their systems, the malpractice they demonstrate on an almost daily basis, and the sheer ignorance of what a test score is or how accountability actually works. If the entire state—every school and district and school board member and journalist and public education advocate—simply tossed the results in the trash, ignored them, discounted them, and identified them for what they are—a load of crap—maybe other things would rise to take their place.
Because other, more important things do exist.
Go ask a parent about the benefits they need from a school. Ask a community leader. The student. A faith leader. They’ll say they want deep, meaningful learning. They want a safe, conducive learning environment. They want students to connect with each other, have friends, and feel like they belong. Students want to be engaged. They want us to see them as whole humans. They want to be well-prepared for whatever comes next.
Parents frequently ask that schools help students learn to be noble and fair—not something I expected when I began my research all those years ago, but there it is.
What parents and student will never say—and this I know because I am in the business of asking—is that one of those benefits is a higher standardized test score for a child. I have asked this type of question literally millions of times and not one time did the higher state test score come up. Not once.
So why do we continue to account for something no parent believes is a benefit for their child. And fail to account for the reasons they entrust their children to a school every day?
That’s what the narrative should shift to—those very reasons. Go to your communities, parents, and students and ask about what benefits matter to them. Make a list. And then learn to account for your effectiveness as a school at delivering them. That way when the state cranks out a summarized piece of nonsense in the form of a school grade you’ll be positioned to dismiss it, to say, “not sure what that means because it’s from a test that can’t identify effectiveness, plugged into a compliance formula that also has nothing to with effectiveness, so you’ll have to ask them. But if you tell me what benefits you need for your child, well, that I can handle.”
What TEA is doing is akin to asking you to believe Monopoly money is real. If enough people believe it, it will begin to take on value. But if enough of us reject it, we push it to the side for something that is real, we stand a chance at getting to truths we can and should act on.
TEAs ratings only have meaning if we believe and accept them. So don’t. Rather, believe that schools exist to benefit students, and account for your effectiveness at delivering those benefits.
Maybe that will be just the thing to finally end this charade we’ve been in for however many decades its been.
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 driver, or a great cook, and have failed all three compliance tests. One is not a marker for the other.
Thus if someone tries to pass compliance off as effectiveness you should reject any resulting judgments as invalid, dumb and naïve.
Second, remember what a standardized test does: a standardized test is a research instrument that provides estimates of how students compare to each other at a moment in time within a subject domain. That just means that the test positions students somewhere along a continuum, from the student furthest below average to the student furthest above. That’s useful for a researcher to know, because when other research is laid on top of the continuum they can observe patterns they might not be able to otherwise see.
But on their own standardized test scores are pretty useless because absent more research you can’t see what caused a student to land where they do. And if you can’t observe a cause, you don’t have anything to judge. That’s pretty simple logic, but ignorance has long prevailed, and the world continues to believe that high test scores are always a sign of effective schools, and low test scores are a sign of failure. That leads to some embarrassingly bad conclusions.
For example, if a school is filled with students who would likely have high scores no matter the school they attended we’re at risk of declaring it good with no evidence for the judgment, thus awarding it a participation trophy. But if it is filled with students who are likely to struggle no matter the school they attend, why then that school is a failure as are those who choose to work in a challenging environment. In a lot of those schools, given the neighborhoods they tend to be in, we’d be at risk of writing off the students and the neighborhoods as unteachable, dooming them with a false but self-fulfilling prophecy.
To summarize: standardized test scores have never, will never, and can never serve on their own as an indicator of effectiveness. Thinking otherwise is bad for everybody.
Which creates a double whammy when it comes to accountability. When compliance combines with the misuse of a research instrument it becomes surprisingly hard to see, but see it we must: when results that on their own cannot signal effectiveness are shoved into a compliance formula that can’t identify effectiveness, the result is at best invalid, but more likely dead wrong. Any pretense that a school judgment derived from such a convoluted mess is meaningful is a joke.
The result: Texas spends a hundred and some odd million dollars a year on an accounting system that has zero capacity to account for the effectiveness of a school. Across the country that number is in the billions.
The absurdity in that would be laughable, except that the stakes are so high. In Texas, Commissioner Morath, the governor, and the senate love the negative attention the invalid judgments bring because it serves their larger agendas: vouchers, privatization, etc.
And now Morath wants to make it even harder to comply by shifting the compliance lines which never signaled effectiveness in the first place. Which he is disingenuously claiming is good for Texas students (how can something that is meaningless be good for anybody?). Except all it will do is let him portray public schools in a more negative light than before, furthering the agenda of a small minority, while leaving the entire world completely ignorant as to where Texas schools are and are not yet as effective as they should be.
So let’s discount all of that. Let’s ignore the speciousness in their systems, the malpractice they demonstrate on an almost daily basis, and the sheer ignorance of what a test score is or how accountability actually works. If the entire state—every school and district and school board member and journalist and public education advocate—simply tossed the results in the trash, ignored them, discounted them, and identified them for what they are—a load of crap—maybe other things would rise to take their place.
Because other, more important things do exist.
Go ask a parent about the benefits they need from a school. Ask a community leader. The student. A faith leader. They’ll say they want deep, meaningful learning. They want a safe, conducive learning environment. They want students to connect with each other, have friends, and feel like they belong. Students want to be engaged. They want us to see them as whole humans. They want to be well-prepared for whatever comes next.
Parents frequently ask that schools help students learn to be noble and fair—not something I expected when I began my research all those years ago, but there it is.
What parents and student will never say—and this I know because I am in the business of asking—is that one of those benefits is a higher standardized test score for a child. I have asked this type of question literally millions of times and not one time did the higher state test score come up. Not once.
So why do we continue to account for something no parent believes is a benefit for their child. And fail to account for the reasons they entrust their children to a school every day?
That’s what the narrative should shift to—those very reasons. Go to your communities, parents, and students and ask about what benefits matter to them. Make a list. And then learn to account for your effectiveness as a school at delivering them. That way when the state cranks out a summarized piece of nonsense in the form of a school grade you’ll be positioned to dismiss it, to say, “not sure what that means because it’s from a test that can’t identify effectiveness, plugged into a compliance formula that also has nothing to with effectiveness, so you’ll have to ask them. But if you tell me what benefits you need for your child, well, that I can handle.”
What TEA is doing is akin to asking you to believe Monopoly money is real. If enough people believe it, it will begin to take on value. But if enough of us reject it, we push it to the side for something that is real, we stand a chance at getting to truths we can and should act on.
TEAs ratings only have meaning if we believe and accept them. So don’t. Rather, believe that schools exist to benefit students, and account for your effectiveness at delivering those benefits.
Maybe that will be just the thing to finally end this charade we’ve been in for however many decades its been.
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