An Educational Contrarian

Texas just released more of its school grading nonsense. I imagined myself in a Q&A situation. This was done with my home state in mind, but this applies much more broadly. It is way too long for a blog, but it needs to be somewhere. 1. What is a standardized test like the ones used by Texas to create its ratings designed to show? Surprisingly little. Standardized testing is a methodology that allows a researcher to observe the patterns in a population of students relative to a defined domain. So, for example, if students in some neighborhoods have more of the domain than in others. Its genius is that it does this without ever asking or knowing how much of the domain any student possesses. No one can measure the amount of literacy any student possesses—just as you can’t measure the amount of humor, cleverness, or grit any student possesses. But it is possible to observe when a student has more or less of a trait than their peers. That is a tiny bit of information, but it is enough ...

It is an understatement here in early 2025 to suggest that public education is under assault. At both the federal and state levels there seems to be this perverse desire to do away with one of our most democratizing of institutions. In the past when I criticized such efforts I was arguing against a hypothetical future, but no more. The future is here and those of us who care about public education had better figure out what to do about it. I have appreciated any number of writers giving voice to the positives that might emerge, particularly those who write in my own field of accountability studies. Their optimism is much needed. But I am also concerned in that literally every article or opinion I have read is encouraged by the chance to finally measure what matters. It is that sentiment toward measurement that concerns me. The idea seems to be that we picked the wrong things to measure , or not enough things, and that should we be measuring different things we might finally be able ...

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...