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...