Category: Assessment

The Science of School Renewal

Posted on | by Sam

(NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

There’s a revolution underway in the scientific community, and it’s changing the way we understand both the structure and the inner workings of the universe. These insights have far-reaching implications for all of us – and none of them are being heeded by the leading voices of our current efforts of transform America’s antediluvian public education system.

This is a serious problem.  Here are three examples of what I mean:

1. The Relativity of Learning – Almost everyone is familiar with Albert Einstein’s game-changing theory of relativity – an insight that, overnight, overturned an idea that had governed human thought for more than 200 years. Fewer among us can explain the theory in any depth, but we know this much: Einstein demonstrated that time itself is not, as had been assumed by Isaac Newton and others, a fixed construct that is experienced uniformly, but rather a malleable construct that is experienced relative to something and/or someone else. This seismic development in human thought moved us away from the Newtonian notion of absolutes, and toward a deeper understanding of just how fully we experience the world in particular ways.

The lesson to be learned from this seems clear enough: we should be wary of absolutist thinking in our own lives (and, certainly, in our organizations). Yet contrast this insight with the K-12 education landscape, which is still working in absolutes, and still basing its biggest decisions on a single, standardized measure of success: basic-skills reading and math scores. This doesn’t mean our interest in these subjects is unimportant – literacy and numeracy matter greatly – but it does mean we’ve failed to learn something essential about the nature of things. Otherwise, we’d be asking a different question when it comes to school accountability: If learning, like time, is relative, how can we develop less standardized (and more customized) assessments that will help us know if we’re being successful at helping children learn to use their minds well?

2. The Quantum Mechanics of Motivation – As you may know, although our general rules for understanding the workings of the universe on a macro scale – a.k.a. classical physics – work quite predictably and neatly, those same rules mean absolutely nothing at the messier micro level – a.k.a. quantum mechanics. What quantum mechanics reveal is that relationships are the key determiner of everything. Subatomic particles cannot exist without the presence of another, and the more we try to observe and codify their nonlinear behavior into a series of linear “if/then” statements, the less relevant our insights become. It’s just too complicated – even for quantum scientists.

Similarly, we humans are nonlinear beings, and the relationships we form (or don’t form) are the key determinants of everything in our personal and professional lives. Yet contrast this insight with the K-12 education landscape, in which both elected officials and philanthropic leaders are pursuing if/then incentive programs based on the belief that pay for performance will be the missing tonic our educators need. It’s the difference between a Newtonian view of the world – which views things in straightforward terms of cause and effect – and a Quantum Mechanics view of the world – which recognizes the inherent unpredictability of the entities it is observing.

The good news is we don’t need to be so abstract. Check out these insights from three different studies of human behavior and the human responses to programs, like performance pay, that are based on extrinsic rewards:

  • “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose interest for the activity.” (Deci 1971)
  • “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.” (Amabile 1996)
  • “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation towards the activity.” (Reeve 2004)

Why aren’t we paying attention to this? Or, more to the point, why aren’t we asking a different question when it comes to issues of motivation in the workplace: How can we move from a culture of extrinsic compliance to a culture of intrinsic commitment?

3. The Ecology of Organizational Culture – Finally, there’s the changing way scientists describe the principles of ecology, a word that literally means “the study of the house.” What’s becoming apparent is that order and balance in our house (whether it’s Earth or a country or an elementary school) are not achieved by complex, overly prescribed controls, but by a few clearly delineated simple structures, and with a healthy dose of freedom for individual entities to pursue what they feel is significant. As physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra puts it: “In recent years, biologists and ecologists have begun to shift their metaphors from hierarchies to networks, and have come to realize that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, cooperate, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Apply these insights once again to the K-12 education landscape and you see what to do immediately: move away from the Newtonian change model of “critical mass,” and toward a more modern model of “critical connections.” Educational scholar John Goodlad urged as much following his massive comprehensive study of schooling in America in the 1970s and 1980s: “Schools will improve slowly, if at all,” he wrote, “if reforms are thrust upon them. Rather, the approach having most promise is one that will seek to cultivate the capacity of schools to deal with their own problems, to become largely self-renewing.”

These insights have profound implications for how we structure the science of school renewal – as opposed to the business of school reform – in the years and decades ahead. Instead of a push toward greater standardization and absolute constructs, we should sharpen our assessment tools to become more finely attuned to the relativistic learning needs of children. We should create organizational conditions that nurture intrinsic motivation in adults and children.  And we should be more mindful of the networks and people we will need in order to do the difficult work of systems change, and begin asking ourselves the only question that really matters: Of all the things we can do together, what must we do?

The Good, Bad & Ugly of Value-Added Analysis

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Good, Bad & Ugly of Value-Added Analysis

I’m on the road all week — from DC to Oregon to Philadelphia to Oklahoma City — and everywhere I go people seem to be talking about the L.A. Times’ recent expose into the city’s school teachers, and the extent to which individual teachers are either helping students learn — or holding them back.

The conversations are based on the Times’ decision to use value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Thickening the plot, the Times produced this report using seven years of data the school district had — but had never analyzed. As the paper explains: “Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student’s past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student’s actual performance after a year is the ‘value’ that the teacher has added or subtracted.”

Because the idea of value-added analysis, or VAA, seems to be everywhere in K-12 education discussions (it has been embraced by the Obama administration, and many of the field’s leading philanthropic entities, from Gates to Walton to Broad, are intrigued by the approach), I want to offer what I see as the good, the bad and the ugly of VAA — and of the Times’ decision to use VAA as the foundation of its landmark report:

The Good — As the Times rightly reports, “though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.” This has been a catastrophic failure by all of us to this point, since all sides agree the effectiveness of the teacher is the single most important in-school factor toward determining the extent to which young people will learn. Children should not have their minds subjected to a roulette wheel of opportunity; every child deserves a highly-effective teacher. And although the Times article is primarily about the VAA scores, it identifies other core conditions the most effective teachers shared, including the encouragement of critical thinking and “the surest sign of a teacher’s effectiveness — the engagement of his or her students.” In this way, the Times demonstrates its seriousness in trying to unpack the mystery of what makes some teachers more effective than others. And we need as much of that as we can get.

The Bad — Unfortunately, despite some caveats throughout about how VAA would only make up a percentage of a teacher’s future evaluation, the reality is that VAA is assuming a disproportionate share of the emerging analyses. The Times says as much when it admits that VAA “offers the closest thing available to an objective assessment of teachers.”

But what if the closest thing available isn’t actually the closest thing to the truth? Based on this logic, the NFL should only draft college players based on the things it can observe objectively — like their 40-yard dash times, or the number of times they can bench press 225 pounds. Yet as any fan knows, this isn’t the best path toward finding the best players (but don’t tell Al Davis). And a similar approach in education is also not the best path, precisely because it simplifies an extremely complex undertaking. After all, if the only thing I’m going to be evaluated on is my speed, why bother working on my pass-catching ability? And if in reality all that matters is my VAA score (despite what people say), why do anything other than focus on preparing children for the tests? So the “bad” is less about the VAA scores, and more about their being used in relative isolation. When we do that, we get Campbell’s Law.

The Ugly — I see the ugly aspects of this unfolding on both sides of the debate. For the Times, I think their article reflects their own limited understanding of education, and teaching, and the core conditions of a powerful learning environment. Journalism exists to educate the general public about core issues that are essential to our civic health and well-being. The Times says it wrote the article to help parents stop feeling like they’re in the dark when it comes to their children’s schooling. Yet the main thing I notice when I speak to my friends who are parents (and non-educators) is how much they feel they must rely on test scores to gauge a school’s overall health — even though any good educator knows it provides no more than a partial sliver of the picture a parent needs in order to make a sound decision about where they should send their child. Does the Times’ study help paint a fuller picture for parents? Or is it merely painting over the same narrow corner of a canvas that is in fact much larger, richer, and more opaque than we’d like it to be?

On the other side, I see that the L.A. Teachers Union has already called for a massive boycott of the Times, and is looking into legal action.

Can I please apply to be the Union’s communications director?

Why wouldn’t their lead story be a public statement that uses the article to amplify the shared need for better information about how students learn and what teachers can do to be more effective — and then restate that test scores from year to year represent a single piece of the picture that is both valuable and overvalued? In effect, use the Times article to focus attention on the need for better, more balanced information about student learning and teacher effectiveness, not simply to excoriate a major newspaper and deny any validity of VAA whatsoever.

But that’s not what they did, of course, which will only contribute to the growing national sense that teachers’ unions are the most convenient villains in an evolving script that is much more complex than good guys v. bad guys (or reformers v. the status quo).

Once again, I’m left with the same simple thought: We can do better.

Should She Stay or Should She Go? Michelle Rhee and the Upcoming DC Election

Posted on | by Sam | 13 Comments on Should She Stay or Should She Go? Michelle Rhee and the Upcoming DC Election

(NOTE: This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

It’s almost election season in DC, which means I need to decide once and for all if Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee – and, by extension, Mayor Adrian Fenty – deserve another four years at the helm.

Here are the arguments as I see them:

On one hand, it’s incontrovertible that Rhee has sparked both local and national conversations that were long overdue. Her decision to show up at a DCPS warehouse, with cameras, and shine a light on a system so dysfunctional and disorganized that it allowed seemingly scarce resources to remain unused was both brilliant and galvanizing. Her determination to confront the fecklessness of our current teacher evaluation system placed the issue front and center in discussions of systemic reform, where it belongs. And her millennial focus on eradicating the generational injustices of our school system has turned the issue into a mainstream conversation-starter. Those are major accomplishments for which she is largely responsible. Shame on the rest of us for not figuring out, much earlier, how to inject this work with a similar, undeniable sense of urgency. And woe is we if she leaves after just four years and the city returns to square one, denying us all the chance to make a more detailed judgment on the viability of her strategies for lasting change.

On the other hand, Rhee’s primary weapon – a fierce, uncompromising rhetoric – has also been her Achilles heel. She has recklessly alienated a majority of the very people she most needs for lasting reform to occur: DC’s public school teachers. Her unwavering reliance on “data” – and a limited definition of data at that – is leading us toward a system where schools and educators are incentivized to relentlessly, and with great discipline, move the needle on a single measure of basic-skills proficiency in math and reading. This is an extremely effective political strategy for it locates a nebulous and Sisyphean effort in a single, easily trackable number. It’s also, I believe, a largely illusory effort that hinders our ability to identify truly aspirational standards for children, and apply the same level of discipline and determination toward the establishment of a school system that is aligned around what young people really need in order to be successful in college, throughout their chosen careers, and as active and responsible citizens in our democracy.

In sum, my chief concern is that Rhee will be unable to generate what noted school reform expert Michael Fullan has described as the single most important resource for bringing about systemic change – collective capacity, or the ability to “generat[e] the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

As I’ve written previously, this does NOT mean Ms. Rhee is merely required to give people more opportunities to collaborate. What is required, though, is disciplined, strategically employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (as opposed to the optimal testing environment). As Fullan writes: “The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.”

There are many people I respect who believe this is exactly what Michelle Rhee is bringing about. I have just as many friends and colleagues who are equally convinced that Rhee will be unable to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts.

It may be clear which way I’m leaning, but what do you think? Does Rhee deserve four more years to make a true go of it and see if DC can achieve the impossible? Or is her relentless focus on test score data and an oppositional rhetoric a guarantee that any lasting change that comes about will not be the true change we seek?

A Sinking Ship?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on A Sinking Ship?

During a week in which both Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama will publicly defend their education reform priorities – in response to severe criticism from the country’s leading civil rights organizations – I’m trying to figure out how a set of ideas that was so close to mobilizing a quiet revolution in public education has instead led the soldiers of that revolution to passionately (and loudly) take up arms against each other.

All I can come up with is they’ve gotten some lousy advice. And I think I see where they’ve gone wrong.

Take, for example, the issue of teacher evaluations, which is a major component of the Race to the Top selection criteria. First of all, anyone who doesn’t think our current system of teacher and principal evaluation needs to be completely remade is someone you should never listen to again on any issue of consequence. Teacher and principal assessments in this country are a joke – and do nothing to advance the quality of the profession or improve the overall learning conditions for kids. So the Obama Administration’s decision to shine light on this issue is spot-on.

Why, then, has that issue transmogrified into a bold push for using financial incentives to boost teacher motivation? Who thought that was a good idea, and why did anybody listen? As I’ve written previously, the leading thinkers in the business community have recognized for years the limitations of this strategy (Enron, anyone?). Dan Pink has posted a useful video in which he cites a study by, of all entities, the Federal Reserve, showing how cash incentives work well – as long as the desired behaviors are simple and non-cognitive. Yet this is an issue the administration continues to try and defend. They should drop it like it’s hot.

Similarly, there’s the push to adopt a common set of academic standards across all fifty states. This, too, is something I’ve written about previously, and this, too, is an issue I’m ready to support, provided the projected purpose for the use of the standards is in line with what other high-achieving countries around the world have used them for – namely, to provide guidance, clarity and quality control, not to enforce a strict set of restrictions that prescribe the actions of local educators. We need standards that are viewed as indicators of wisdom our students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction.

Is this the path the Obama administration and the National Governors Association seek as well? I’m not sure, but I can see why some people feel nervous.  We are, after all, still a culture intent on overvaluing the illusory certainty that basic-skills test scores provide us. We still seek linear progress in the most nonlinear of professions and experiences. And we still operate in a society where powerful forces driven by the bottom line have the capacity to steer policy decisions to their liking. So although the jury is still out on this one, I feel more nervous than confident.

Finally, there’s the issue of making federal money for states a competitive, rather than strictly a formula-driven, process. If you want to view this one purely by its ability to engineer massive changes in how states operate, it’s a runaway success. States have revised laws to lift caps on the number of charter schools, adopted the new common standards, and poured thousands of hours into finalizing their grant proposals. Initially, two states were awarded money in the first round. Today, 18 more states and the District of Columbia were named finalists for the remaining $3.4 billion in funding.

This aspect of the Obama administration’s proposals is what particularly rankled the civil rights groups. As Schott Foundation president John Jackson put it, “No state should have to compete to protect the civil rights of their children in their states.”

Hard to argue with that point, but in the interest of moving forward, I want to offer three simple pieces of START STOP KEEP advice to the Obama team:

  1. KEEP focusing on teacher and principal quality and evaluation, but STOP doing it via the 20th century notion of carrots and sticks, and START investing deeply in quality teacher preparation programs and evaluation systems.
  2. KEEP emphasizing the utility of a stronger, clearer and leaner set of national standards that can guide instruction and provide quality control to a system that sorely needs it, but STOP viewing it as a way to impose more national standardized exams, and START heeding both the civil rights groups’ recommendation for common resource opportunity standards, and the need for a long term goal (once the aforementioned teacher preparation programs are up to snuff) of having national content standards provide guidance for teachers, who then devise locally-administered assessments based on their detailed knowledge of what they’ve taught and who they’ll be testing. (This is what many of the highest-performing countries in the world do, by the way.)
  3. KEEP saying that providing a high-quality public education to all children is the civil rights issue of our time, but STOP trying to do so by incentivizing competition that results in winners and losers, and START advocating for a Constitutional amendment that makes the guarantee of an equal opportunity to learn for all children something the states cannot ignore.

I think that would help a lot. What do YOU think?

Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Today, a Washington Post story reported that the push for common national standards in reading and math is gaining ground. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have now agreed to adopt the standards as their own.

This is notable progress when one considers how all prior efforts to promote a common set of academic standards in the United States have failed. But as the Post’s Nick Anderson reports, the Obama administration, working in concert with the National Governors Association, has been effective where others have failed by “encouraging the movement and dangling potential financial incentives for states to join.” The administration has also opted not to fund the actual work of the groups that drafted the standards, relying instead on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private donors.

As with many other major issues, the question of standards has become a polarizing issue with starkly divided camps. On one side are advocates like Massachusetts state education commissioner Mitch Chester, who believe the proposed standards would provide “clearer signals to K-12 students about their readiness for success at the next level, including readiness for college or careers.” On the other side are folks like the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, who worry that the push for common standards “is opening the door to federal control. It is the most alarming centralization of power in education you can come up with.”

Who’s right?

Well, as is usually the case, I think you can quickly dismiss the folks who inhabit the extreme poles of each camp. Clearly, standards by themselves will achieve nothing but, well, a new set of standards. Just as clearly, a set of common standards need not mean the end of local control and teacher autonomy, or the arrival of full-scale standardization.

Looking around the world is instructive here. Finland, the country with the best education system in the world, has national standards (in all subjects), but it uses them to provide guidance, clarity and quality control, not to enforce a strict set of restrictions that prescribe the actions of local educators. Furthermore, standards are viewed as indicators of wisdom that students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction. In fact, Finland has no national exams, and student assessments are devised and implemented locally, thanks to the deep investments that country has made in its teachers.

This is a good model for how national standards should be used, says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the OECD’s Education Indicators and Analysis Division in Paris. “The question for the U.S. is not just how many charter schools it establishes,” he said, “but how to build the capacity for all schools to assume charter-like autonomy, as happens in some of the best-performing education systems.” Schleicher also points out how the U.S. relies disproportionately on “external accountability, ” or tests and consequences for poor performance, to improve schools.  By contrast, other countries do more to build their schools’ overall capacities for success, and rely on a variety of measures to gauge their progress.

Viewed in this way, national standards become helpful guideposts that contribute to a greater sense of shared clarity about what children should generally know and be able to do, not hurtful hitching posts that circumscribe local creativity, personalization, and autonomy.

Is this the path the Obama administration and the National Governors Association seek as well? I’m not sure, but I can see why some people feel nervous.  We are, after all, still a culture intent on overvaluing the illusory certainty that basic-skills test scores provide us. We still seek linear progress in the most nonlinear of professions and experiences. And we still operate in a society where powerful forces driven by the bottom line have the capacity to steer policy decisions to their liking. (Just look at the recent financial reform bill, and the last-minute changes made to it that will continue to allow banks to engage in the sorts of activities that led to the global economic crisis in the first place!)

Princeton economist Allan Blinder echoes a similar note of caution. “It is clear that the U.S. and other rich nations will have to transform their educational systems so as to produce workers for the jobs that will actually exist in their societies. Simply providing more education is probably a good thing on balance, especially if a more educated labor force is a more flexible labor force that can cope more readily with non-routine tasks and occupational change. But it is far from a panacea. In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.”

Done correctly, I believe a new set of national standards (in all subjects) can help us clarify both how and what we teach our children, just as it has in other countries around the world. But if the end result of this movement is little more than a new set of national exams, we will do little more than fall further behind.

The Testing Carousel Goes Round and Round . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Testing Carousel Goes Round and Round . . .

Today’s Washington Post reports that the test scores of elementary school kids slipped this year after two successive years of growth, “a setback to Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee as she seeks to overhaul the city’s schools.”

No doubt, this news is being used by Rhee’s critics to point out that her particular brand of reform can’t bring the city the lasting change in its public schools that everyone desires. Meanwhile, Rhee responded to the news with equanimity. “We like to celebrate when we do well, and when we don’t, we have to take responsibility,” she said. “We have to own this and figure out how to move forward.”

Can I please make a wish to the education fairy and ask that this be the last of this sort of story I ever see? For those of us who believe that the best way to assess a school’s overall health involves a balanced scorecard of assessments, we can’t have it both ways — you can’t criticize Rhee for focusing on tests, and then lambaste her when those same scores are poor. It either is or isn’t a viable way to assess the health of a school.

In that same spirit, why aren’t folks like Rhee proactively diffusing these sorts of stories by getting out in front of the curve and releasing their own bundle of assessment measures, as a way to diffuse the potential power of the test scores when viewed in isolation? Rhee could do this immediately, without even getting into the contentious issue of using performance assessments. The city could stitch together an interim scorecard, made up entirely of existing measures (student and faculty absenteeism rates, student disciplinary data, graduation rates, a balanced set of course offerings, school climate surveys, and yes, test scores) and use it to educate the public about the many elements that go into a high-quality learning environment? Depending on what the data tell us, it might even lead to some insights that could drive future policy proposals. So let’s stop bickering over the wrong thing — otherwise, we’ll be stuck interminably on this basic-skills testing carousel, and forced to watch it go round and round while other countries are actively revising their education systems to become more effective at imparting higher-order skills and preparing children for the 21st century.

We can do better.

How to Build a School System That Nurtures Creativity

Posted on | by Sam | 7 Comments on How to Build a School System That Nurtures Creativity

In case you missed it, there’s an important new piece in Newsweek about the declining capacity of Americans to think creatively — and what we can do about it.

This is, of course, the primary issue that has driven Sir Ken Robinson’s work (if you’re among the few who haven’t yet seen his hilarious and insightful 2006 TED talk on the subject, check it out). As Ken puts it, the problem is that our current system of education is more apt to “mine our minds” of its most precious materials than it is to plant fertile seeds that can sprout new ideas and ways of seeing the world. The Newsweek piece picks up on this theme, noting that “around the world, other countries are making creativity development a national priority.” Meanwhile, our focus in the U.S. remains on clarifying what exactly we need to put into all children’s minds, rather than how we can best pull out their individual talents and passions.

In addition to what Newsweek outlines as constructive steps to address the creativity crisis (hint: cognitive science and a deeper understanding of how the brain really works), I’d like to remind everyone what Finland did to become the world’s leader in public education: an intensive investment in teacher education (NOT performance pay), and a complete overhaul of the curriculum and assessment system in order to create a true “thinking curriculum” for all students.

More specifically, teachers in Finland receive 2 or 3 years of high-quality training completely at state expense. The program is extremely competitive, and it is followed by a full year of clinical experience and studying under a master teacher. All teachers also engage in critical friends group work throughout their careers, ensuring that they engage in continual self-reflection, evaluation, and proactive efforts to improve the quality of their professional practice.

The result of this deep investment in teaching, and in a curriculum that is focused on inquiry (as opposed to facts)? A learning environment that encourages both students and teachers to try new ideas and methods, learn about and through innovations, and cultivate creativity in schools. As Linda Darling-Hammond says in her excellent new book The Flat World and Education, “Over the past 40 years, Finland has shifted from a highly centralized system emphasizing external testing to a more localized system in which highly trained teachers design curriculum around very lean national standards. . . . The logic of the system is that investments in the capacity of local teachers and schools to meet the needs of all students, coupled with the thoughtful guidance about goals, can unleash the benefits of local creativity in the cause of common, equitable outcomes.”

Why can’t we do this? WHY AREN’T WE DOING THIS?

Data-Driven Decision Making . . . and Soccer?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Data-Driven Decision Making . . . and Soccer?

Great timing.

A week after I wrote about what the World Cup can teach us about school reform, the New York Times published an article about the growing push for more detailed data in the relatively data-free world of professional soccer.

I am not, for what it’s worth, against the use of more sophisticated data in making decisions about how to improve the learning conditions for kids (or, for that matter, how to make better decisions on the soccer pitch). Who would be? In fact, I’ve written in the past about how a balanced scorecard in schools would help educators do their jobs more effectively.

That being said, I am very much against the glorification of data as a way to make extremely subjective, non-linear things — like learning how to use one’s mind well, or watching a collective burst of creativity and synchronicity that leads to a beautiful soccer goooooooaaaaaaal — into extremely objective, linear things for which we can appropriately plan and script out a desired, predictable response.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that this new push for soccer data is reported the same week as an announcement in my home city that Chancellor Michelle Rhee intends to significantly expand the use of standardized tests so that “every D.C. student from kindergarten through high school is regularly assessed to measure academic progress and the effectiveness of teachers.” What’s afoot in both instances is, on one hand, the (appropriate) desire to take human ingenuity and apply it to situations that in the past have lacked specificity, and, on the other, the (inappropriate) effort to make everything quantifiable, resulting in an overreliance on that which can be measured — at the expense of everything else.

Notably, the push for soccer data seems far more measured than what I see in education. According to Mark Brunkhart, the president of a company that provides soccer data for a fee to clubs and news organizations, he and his staff do not blindly evangelize statistics. Every month or two, he says, he gets a call from a professor or graduate student who is a rabid soccer fan and just finished Moneyball, the book that brought sabermetrics into the mainstream in 2003. (I wrote about Moneyball and its potentially positive implications for school reform in a 2009 column titled “What Would Theo Do?”)

“Every single one comes with the idea that they’re going to solve soccer with the ‘Moneyball’ approach,” Brunkhart said, “and I try to talk them all down.” Similarly, the president of the Society for American Baseball Research pointed to Miroslav Klose’s second goal in Germany’s 4-0 victory against Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinals as an example of how statistics seem to overlook the nuance and elegance of soccer. “A series of three or four absolutely beautiful passes — how do you capture that?” he said. “It’s just the nature of the game.”

Would that I were seeing similar restraint among our education leaders. As longtime educator Ted Sizer once said, “Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.”

More Tests on the Way in DC?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on More Tests on the Way in DC?

In yesterday’s Washington Post, reporter Bill Turque wrote that Michelle Rhee is seeking an outside contractor to help dramatically expand DCPS’ use of standardized tests, so that every grade from K through 12 will have some form of assessment to measure student progress and teacher effectiveness.

Is this what happens when we pray too long at the altar of “data-driven decision making?”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for what that concept actually means — using information to guide all decisions about how to help children learn more effectively — but the faulty logic here is that adding more standardized tests at the end of every school year will achieve that worthy goal. Wouldn’t it be better to start exploring how to strategically bundle other existing measures that tell us a lot about a school’s overall health (such as attendance, graduation rates, faculty absenteeism, and, yes, attitudinal surveys of the students themselves)? Wouldn’t it be better to start experimenting with ways to have other schools in the District implement student portfolio assessments as effectively as the good people at Thurgood Marshall Academy — recently profiled on CBS News — have done?And wouldn’t it be better to stop pretending that systemic reform, and the impact those changes will have on individual students, can be as easily monitored and measured as these tests suggest?

Bring on the information revolution, I say — and this ain’t it.

Starting a School, Part I

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Starting a School, Part I

Thanks to the vision of the remarkable people at Center for Inspired Teaching, I’m part of an initial working group tasked with bringing a new school to life. And, after a three-hour meeting yesterday, I’m struck by the totality of decisions to make — from the sacred (hiring the principal and staff, designing the curriculum, etc.) to the profane (choosing a food vendor, picking office furniture, etc.).

What’s most exciting to me is the chance to help create the central frame on which the future faculty will build — the vision, the mission, the curriculum, and the developmental benchmarks. Already the process is uncovering the core questions that need to be asked in order to arrive at the optimal frame — “What do we want a graduate of our school to know and be able to do?” “What kind of a person do we want a graduate of our school to be?” “How will we identify our developmental benchmarks?” What will be the interdisciplinary elements of the curriculum?” “To what do we owe our fidelity?”

When you have the opportunity to ask these questions before anything has been established, I’m realizing that you must immediately wrestle with a vital threshold decision — When it comes to identifying our developmental benchmarks, will our school be time-based (e.g., grades, annual progression, etc.) or competency-based (e.g., you don’t progress until you’ve demonstrated mastery of what you need to know to move on)?

So here’s my question for you to consider — Is there ANY reason to maintain a time-based system of schooling, other than the fact it makes it easier to fit into the existing system?