An Educational Contrarian

Here’s why everyone in the state of Texas should take the most recent accountability ratings provided (or about to be provided) by the Texas Education Agency and drop them in the trash. The state of Texas changed its testing program from 2022 to 2023. It added more items, it added different kinds of items, it appears to have added some extraordinarily difficult items, and it moved the administration entirely online. Whatever your feelings about standardized testing (mine are quite strong as anyone who knows me is aware), the guidelines for how you make this sort of change are crystal clear: you start over. The whole (and only legitimate) point of standardized testing is to create comparability of students via a test instrument, both as of a moment in time and over time. Since the students (and the world around them) are going to obviously change and grow, detecting changes and growth is only possible if the design of the instrument stands still. If the instrument shifts at the same tim...

This week the Texas Education Agency did its annual dump of standardized test scores onto the public. All states are in the process of doing the same. Once again, the rhetoric surrounding this dump (in my state and probably yours) is embarrassingly and dangerously ignorant of what a standardized test is and the limits of its interpretive reach. We might as well release the blood pressure readings of all Americans from the lowest to the highest and then entrust all interpretations to those with no medical training or understanding of what a blood pressure reading means. It’s that ridiculous. Should the medical community speak up, to follow the logic applied to test scores, we should ignore their training and logic, treat them as apologists unwilling to stand up for patients, and act as if our patently false understandings are true. And we should use those data we do not understand to judge the effectiveness of our hospitals and the overall medical community. I wish that were hyperbole, ...

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...

(Written in response to Children at Risk supporting Commissioner Morath's desire to move the bar on the state accountability ratings such that a school with a similar result two years running will receive significantly different ratings in those years.) I would love to sit down with the Children at Risk Folks and show just how misguided their support of TEA’s “higher standards” is. Let me first agree, however, that we should absolutely and constantly increase our educational capacity to effectively serve children and prepare them for life. Everything is right with that sentiment.   But states run their accountabilities based on compliance, and therein lies the truly catastrophic problem: no amount of compliance has ever made an organization more effective. But you already know that. Almost every driver on the street has complied with the requirements to obtain a driver’s license, but that doesn’t also mean we are a country of continuously improving drivers. Almost every school in A...

Unfortunately for all of us that care about public schools, Children at Risk is back to releasing more of their junk science in the form of school rankings. They use test scores and graduation rates and a few other variables to create what they claim is a more accurate picture of how schools compare than what the state does. Newspapers all over the state just parroted their nonsense. And here’s why its nonsense: they don’t—and this is unfathomable to me given their position as a research and advocacy organization—have a clue what a standardized test is, what the scores mean, or the limitations on their use. They, like so many others, think that once a score exists it is free to be interpreted in any manner convenient to the interpreter. That is bogus. A standardized test score allows a researcher to analyze the differences in total literacy and numeracy attainment between children. However, absent other research, it does not allow for an analysis of what caused that literacy or numerac...

The recent acquisition by HMH of NWEA seems to have been driven by a phenomenally flawed logic: that normative (i.e., standardized, predictive) testing can be tied to instruction. This error that apparently seems so rational on the surface is so fraught with absurdities that it’s hard to imagine—perhaps think of using a fish as a hammer on a ship since they both occupy a spot in the ocean. I wish I were exaggerating, but I can’t think of anything more absurd at the moment—it's the wrong tool for the job by as far as the eye can see. Standardized testing is a highly technical research methodology that sorts students onto a scale for the purpose of analyzing the relative differences between them. That’s a mouthful. Think of it like this: pretend you wanted to analyze height, but the measuring tape hadn’t yet been invented yet. You could still do an analysis by lining everyone up from the shortest to the tallest. From there you can find the average, identify how many steps above or be...

Education is the only profession that is governed and regulated by non-professionals who regularly view it through highly technical tools they don’t understand and that don’t mean what they think. Their complaints that their policies aren’t getting them what they want in truth are an admission that their policies are ineffective, but rather than admit the truth, they pretend their governance is fine and it's the darned educators who must be blamed. This has been going on for thirty years! Can you name any other situation where a theory of action had failed for decades and there are so few ideas about what do that the policy response is always just to do it again? Let’s imagine for a moment just how truly nonsensical this is. Imagine a group of non-medical professionals who have never performed surgery, been to medical school, or practiced medicine in any way, are put in charge of all governance, regulation, and accountability for medical professionals. They put a set of policies in...