An Educational Contrarian

Kristi Hassett, a trustee in Flower Mound Texas posed the following via Twitter: Many ed reformers want schools to run like businesses. @testsensejt, I wonder what an Industrial Engineer would say about our current testing & accountability regime. What would they look at to determine value? What would they conclude? My response is a smidge long for a tweet, but the question is a good one and the answer goes right to the heart of the matter: People in organizations are generally accountable for the quality and efficacy of their decisions, as judged by a supervisor. Organizations are generally held accountable via market forces, and failure via the market generally signals bad decisions by its people. This is true whether you’re a non profit or an engineering firm. Current school accountability pretends to have invented a competitive market by which to judge schools and then presumes that the position of a school in the market signals the quality of decisions. This is flawed ...

Policy makers continue to set forth choice and charters as the cure-all for what ails education. I can argue the fallacies behind that thinking until I’m blue in the face. However, in this blurb all I want to make clear are the simple economics of the thing. The economic argument alone, I believe, is enough to cause us to rethink the entire charter enterprise. Imagine within a community it costs five dollars a year to educate each general education student. That would be an average. Some students would cost more, and some would cost less, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify the actual costs for a particular student. Now imagine you are someone motivated by profiting from public school dollars and you open a charter to do that. Like the public school, you would be given five dollars for each student who comes to your school. If all the kids who come to your school cost more than five dollars to educate, your business would fail—you would either spend what was...

Last week Texas Commissioner of Education, Mike Morath, again stated his belief that all students can pass each STAAR test and therefore all students and all schools can be successful within the accountability program he is designing. His argument is this: STAAR is a criterion-referenced test, not a norm-referenced test, and thus all kids can pass it. When a friend of mine in attendance questioned this, Commissioner Morath acknowledged some superintendents did not believe this was the case and declared it a “difference of opinion.” When it comes to the world of educational testing and educational accountability, I’m something of a testing and accountability expert. I’ve worked in that world for the better part of my career. I’ve written a book and a number of articles specifically about what such tests were designed to do (which is far more limited than most people think). I’ve read a ton by others way smarter than me on the subject whose work has helped inform my understandings, and...

Definition of Accountability Organizations consist of people, processes, and systems. Each organization exists to produce a benefit, value, or usefulness to those outside the organization. This can be a product for customers, profitability to shareholders, or a service. Accountability connects the degree to which the benefit, value, or usefulness did or did not occur to the people, processes, and systems. An accountability system ultimately assigns cause and responsibility to people. Definition of Accountability System An Accountability System is a change engine. It looks objectively at the degree to which the benefit, value, or usefulness is accomplished and generates findings that must be acted upon. An accountability system is not a reporting system per se, but much more. Reporting systems elevated to accountability systems risk judgments of success or failure that have nothing to do with the benefit, value, or usefulness it is an organization’s job to provide.

A good friend sent this knowing I'd be interested. I was. My response is below. https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/top-college-rankings-list-2017-us-news-investigation/ Hi George— Thanks for sharing. Tons of connections. I’m long been suspicious of educational “standards,” those laundry lists of content states put out, and what that implies about education: education is about learning “stuff.” However, that “stuff” is based on what elites can most easily learn, providing them a distinct advantage over non-elites. As long as “stuff” remains at the core of what is to be taught, I fear that will have the effect of furthering what the author talks about. And once again, a gesture that elites can claim to be about equity is anything but. I started expressing this set of thoughts about six months ago using the graphic below (I don’t think I’ve shown this to you): When success occurs among non-elites from very poor backgrounds it seems not to occur because they somehow ...

Tyranny only becomes possible when power coalesces into the hands of the few. The few will justify and adopt tyranny when they presume their wealth, inheritance, or power, is at risk. Tyranny works to preserve an existing status quo favorable to the few. Tyranny is always a temptation among those who have wealth, inheritance, or power—the founding fathers knew this. Self-governance of all citizens is the greatest tool for stemming the possibility of tyranny and the ravages that come with it. The public school system was created to assist each citizen, regardless of wealth, inheritance, or power, with the goal of self-governance. No wonder the tyrannical hates public schools.

Texas Aspires distributed the comments below and to the right this week. They are fraught with error and misunderstanding and therefore worthy of being dismissed, but what the heck. FIRST, any fear mongering by educators is around a system that research has shown is in fact harmful to students and schools and fails to meet any of the actual policy goals. SECOND, eerie is a word for something that inspires inexplicable fear or dread. What is in fact eerie is that every A-F implementation has been done absent evidence that A-F actually works: the fact that it appears on the surface to be rational does not automatically render it so. What should be eerie is the lack of critical thinking in major educational policy decisions, and among those who blindly support such things, absent at the minimum a cursory investigation. THIRD, regarding the point that: “A-F grades for campuses won’t hurt the students who attend them,” I reference, as just one of many sources, the e...