An Educational Contrarian

Let’s pose the question(s) this way. What if you spent thirty+ years of your life directed to do the same thing day in and day out by those who don’t really understand what it takes to do what you do? What if the basic theory of action for how to evaluate your actions was flawed at the outset and yet changed not one whit over that period? What if every policy conversation stared with the presumption that the policies were solid, placing blame for their ineffectiveness squarely on the people tasked with executing them? What if the manner of accounting for the effort was flawed to the point that it couldn’t identify effectiveness or failure, but because the results matched commonly held biases about wealthy and impoverished communities and peoples, they weren’t questioned? What if the reason the profession in the above scenario didn’t crater or fall apart was due to lots of dedicated folks willing to work for a mission despite the challenge? What if a crisis came along of astronomical pr...

Here’s a thought: no one can trust an organization that only accounts for a fraction of what it does. You wouldn’t entrust the design of a new school to a firm that was only willing to account for the fact that they are good at bringing projects under budget. What about student centered design? Energy efficiency? Aesthetics? Environmental impact? Etc. To trust an organization requires that the organization account for all the things that matter. Parents and communities regularly tell us that there are about thirty things that matter to them that have the capacity to build stakeholder trust. Keep them safe. Make sure students have friends and feel connected to others. Teach them empathy. Support creativity. Etc. Somewhere around 18 or 19 they get to basic academics, not because basic academics are unimportant, but because there are a great many things that are just as important. And yet what is the accountability landscape in most schools? An accountability that accounts at best for onl...

I ask that question a great deal in my work. Specifically, when I ask educators about how it is done formally, what I hear suggests it is both everything and nothing, the end and the means, hated but grudgingly tolerated, and a fete accompli. It often sounds to me like educators are describing an amorphous multi-tentacled entity that appears annually to render its negative judgments on schools, but then slinks back into some dark, inaccessible hiding place that allows it to avoid scrutiny or even identification. Being amorphous doesn't mean it doesn’t have weight because of course it does. Each state has a formula for compliance (at the behest of the Feds) into which it dumps standardized test data and perhaps graduation rates or attendance. The formula arranges schools, from the school deemed to be the greatest of them all down to the worst, and then parses that scale into labels or grades. The schools at the top usually get a plaque of some sorts confirming their greatness, and t...

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...

The recent situation with the Supreme Court is yet another example of what happens when an institution does not address the discipline of accountability appropriately—trust in that institution will suffer mightily. Being able to account for one’s efforts isn’t just a nice to have. Nor is it something ever well done when imposed from the outside (for the obvious reason that the non-technical outsiders are at a serious lack of understanding how best to do accountability within highly technical institutions). Rather, if trust in the institution is a goal that will only come from within a richly wrought accountability discipline, one capable of telling the unvarnished truth to the organization’s stakeholders to the point that it compels trust and actions deemed appropriate in their eyes. And creating that accountability must be the job of the institution. It does amaze me at the arrogance of important organizations (like what the Supreme Court has been absolutely guilty of doing) that put ...

Let's say that policymakers decided it was time to do something about what they perceive to be the poor performance of hospitals run by cities and municipalities. Now, these policymakers are not medical professionals, they don't work in hospitals or have a clue what happens in hospitals, but they apparently stayed in a Holiday Inn Express recently which endowed them with sufficient expertise that whatever policies they put in place can be considered great even absent medical training or input. They create a set of goals, again, no need for input from medical folks, that don’t actually signal effectiveness and draw lots of lines in the sand as to where they’d like hospitals to be without understanding what either the metrics do or if the lines in the sand mean anything. They then assign label to those lines so it will be clear who is and is not failing within their excellent system that they do not understand and that does not mean what they think. They run with those very polic...