An Educational Contrarian

For a word used with ease in educational policy circles, accountability is a term that is surprisingly misunderstood and misused. Seeing this is relatively simple. Ask an audience to brainstorm a list of terms they associate with accountability and a pattern will quickly emerge. Many of the words will be positive such as: Transparency Effectiveness Responsibility Outcomes And many of the words and phrases will be negative, such as: Feet to the fire Testing due to lack of trust Blame Shame If you list these words in two columns on a sheet of paper what you will be observing are the two sides to accountability. The negative terms represent what happens when an organization refuses to be accountable and/or is perceived as failing. In that case, accountability is something imposed on that organization by outside stakeholders for the purpose of bringing the organization in line. Such an accountability focuses the organization on failure prevention at the expense of everything el...

Standardized test is the name most people assign to the tests used in state accountability systems, commercially available norm-referenced tests, and college admittance tests such as the ACT and SAT. I have long encouraged folks to drop the term “standardized,” since that merely refers to the conditions under which tests can be administered, rather than what this narrow family of tests are and do. Instead, I prefer to call them predictive tests. This describes what they are intended to do. I have also strongly encouraged a more critical use of vocabulary regarding predictive testing. This is because of the massive confusion that results from the plethora of terms now applied to testing that don’t mean what most people think, such as standards-based, or criterion-referenced. What sets a predictive test apart from all other forms of testing is its ability to produce predictive scores. Simply (and crudely) put, if I am slightly above average this year you can predict that I will probably ...

I received a note the other day with an inquiry. It contained five question. I took the opportunity to craft a response I’ll share below, since I get these sorts of questions a lot. Here were the questions: 1. How can a standards based adaptive assessment used throughout the year be one tool used for accountability purposes? 2. If an assessment covering a set range of standards is used throughout the school year, what other factors need to be considered to more effectively determine if students are reaching developmentally appropriate learning targets? 3. Content mastery and student progress on state standards measure student proficiency towards specific items. How should student work samples, portfolios, or other student level artifacts be used as an indication of a school’s ability to develop independent young adults? 4. In terms of accountability, what value is there in communities creating annual measurable goals aligned to a 5 year strategic plan and prog...

I recently posted something to Twitter that generated quite a reaction: "Support for charter schools by policy makers is an admission they don’t want to do the hard work to make public schools better. And their obsession with test scores that don’t mean what they think drives their narrative. True accountability solves this. Don’t you think it’s time?" Most supported the thinking, which is simple logic: you don't charter fire houses or police stations when things go awry--you get experts in to solve whatever problems exist. When it comes to schools, policy makers went another route. But several folks, predictably, did not agree, declaring, with noted exasperation, that charter schools are public schools and for me to say otherwise puts me into the camp of not wanting to have to improve traditional schools to the point that they can compete. I spend my life shredding such stupid arguments, but the point I want to make here is different. Rather than argue what the l...

The basic accountability structure in effective organizations is surprisingly simple. It consists of two parts: the first is a thorough accounting, and the second is an appropriate signal ( thorough and appropriate are key terms here). An effective organization is defined as one that regularly achieves its mission. The accountings that go into an accountability system are determined by what needs to be accomplished in order to achieve the organization’s mission. A hospital would consider patient outcomes. A business would consider its ability to be innovative or profitable. Regardless, the accounting must be thorough. No one would invest in a company that released one month’s worth of financial records from one of its ten divisions. The decision to invest would be invalid. No one would have surgery in a hospital that released only its patient outcomes for a type of surgery other than what you will have. In either case the information to make an effective decision is missing. ...

One of the more interesting (and harmful) things to come out of the test-based accountability era is that we now equate testing with accountability, to the point where most people can’t see how accountability could be done without testing. This, however, is wrong on so many levels. In my work we approach the issue from a far more practical angle. My question years ago was simple: is there a structure or framework to the way in which effective organizations do accountability? Even though hospitals, businesses, and non-profits function in dramatically different ways, and whether formal or informal, is there something they have in common when their results match their mission? The answer was a resounding yes: a common set of patterns and frameworks is most definitely shared across effective organizations. Upon that discovery my work immediately shifted to a simple premise: if effective organizations have an accountability framework in common, and we want schools to among the most effectiv...