Smoke and mirrors and standardized testing by another name
I have some big questions for those who still believe our current model of educational accountability has any real value: Why is education the only field where policymakers pretend compliance equals effectiveness? That’s like saying, “all teachers passed a criminal background check, so they must be great teachers.” Why is education the only field where we judge an entire organization based on an important but narrow slice of what happens inside it? Accountability is supposed to be to all the things that matter, as that is the precursor to trust. Why is education the only field where “accountability” is entirely top down, treating the local context as irrelevant? And why is education the only field where the organizations in wealthy neighborhoods are all but guaranteed to get mostly good marks, while the organizations in poor neighborhoods and all but guaranteed to get bad ones, and we act like that’s okay? In any other profession such a system would be tossed out and those supporting i...