There was a time when most prominent education reformers were in lockstep agreement about the unimpeachable utility of using student test scores to judge teacher quality, but that was before the dogged pursuit of improved test scores went so horribly awry in Atlanta. Recent days have seen some very interesting moves, as several major education reform proponents have suddenly decided they basically agree with Diane Ravitch regarding the negative consequences arising from the inappropriate use of student performance data.

Bill Gates wrote an op-ed in which he expressed shock and dismay that people around the country are using student test scores improperly in evaluating teachers. As Anthony Cody notes, however, Gates was as responsible as anyone for today’s almost religious commitment to wielding student test scores as a significant factor in evaluating teachers. He ensured that the very policies he now decries would gain traction by sending people to Arne Duncan to help design RtTT and by bringing various test-obsessed organizations like TeachPlus and the National Council on Teacher Quality into existence via his foundation’s strategic funding. I don’t think you can still call it philanthropy when a well-meaning donor launches an epidemic of bad practices and then disowns them when the havoc they wreak becomes impossible to ignore.

Gates surely reserves the right to change his mind. He did so, famously, regarding his small schools initiative. Meanwhile, as he begins to walk away from the flawed lever of unfettered teacher blame for things like student test scores that they don’t fully control, states continue the race he inspired to implement these bad, trendy ideas.

While Gates still advocates using test scores as a small factor in teacher evaluations along with other, more subjective information, the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews has concluded that this is altogether a bad idea. “I used to think student test score gains were a good way to rate teachers,” he wrote. “I don’t think so anymore.” He has completely changed his mind. This is a good thing.

Maybe these men have been reading Diane Ravitch’s blog?

Meanwhile, none other than arch-reformer Michael Petrilli had this to say recently: “we should embrace testing as a diagnostic tool, not just as an accountability weapon.” Oh my gosh! Are you kidding me? That’s only what people like Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, Valerie Strauss, and 90% of America’s teachers have been saying for the past who-knows-how-many years. Petrilli is clever, though–he didn’t admit that he was suddenly agreeing with his sworn enemies, the public school non-haters. Instead, he spun that gem (and others, like “official rankings or grades [of schools or teachers] should be informed by test scores but leavened by human judgment”) into a narrative designed to read as if he just thought of the idea of “leavening,” that is, scaling back on the centrality and potency of today’s fashionably unbending nouveau reform mechanisms. As public education’s liver is riddled with the cirrhosis of reform, Petrilli pretends as if he never joined the chorus of quacks prescribing dangerous doses of experimental, unproven techniques. He pretends with his readers that he was never one of those people who called for radically overwrought accountability in the first place, and even as he mouths the very words of the “anti-reformers” he has so consistently lambasted in his space, he gets to nevertheless slam them anew. He agrees with them while dissing them again. In fact, in this column he presents recommendations that appear to have been cribbed from The Death and Life of the Great American School System and serves them up in the middle of a rant against fictional people whom he alleges want nothing less than completely “ending testing and accountability”.

There is a fictional class of “anti-reformer” that education pundits believe exists in large numbers. He is a bad teacher who wants to be paid generously with tax dollars and not ever be asked to demonstrate effectiveness in doing his job. He is what is wrong with public education; he’s the reason we need to just give up and send poor children to private schools.

Sadly, what with all the efforts reformers have expended doing battle with this brazen population of unaccountable slobs, the actual truth is that it doesn’t exist. Critics of reform’s runaway policies–which, it should be noted, ran away with an enthusiastic push from the Petrillis, Gateses, and Mathewses of the world–have never advocated for the “zero accountability” straw man. No one ever has. Thoughtful critics of reform have instead consistently argued exactly what these three men are suddenly pretending to have discovered: that punitive test-based accountability can be abused, misused, and manipulated and therefore should be wielded carefully and thoughtfully, and that the numbers and algorithms of psychometricians and technocrats can easily be overemphasized and will, when that happens, deform the act of educating children and, because of this danger, should be subject to checks and balances and offset by subjective human judgments.

In the wake of the Atlanta cheating scandal, it appears that some reformers are scrambling to “leaven” their own reckless advocacy with something you might call damage control. I still don’t trust them, but I do enjoy hearing them channel Diane Ravitch as they, like her, decry the folly of recklessly overemphasizing test scores.

Read the comments here if you have a chance: http://www.facebook.com/NewsChannel10/posts/10151295325997294

Makes you wonder what a reformer would say to these people. Are they simply being scared by superintendents into saying these things? Or, do they possibly have legitimate input and valid insights informed by their actual experiences with the tests? Should they just shut up and have their kids take the tests? Maybe the reformers can convince these parents that punitive accountability as they’ve designed and implemented it across Texas is a good thing, but from my reading it sounds like it’ll be a tough sell.

Is there even any such thing as too much standardized testing? Is that even possible? With the hand-wringing in some quarters over going from 15 to 5 end-of-course tests in high school (and, by the way, not reducing elementary testing whatsoever at this point), it appears that testing advocates think any reduction whatsoever is pure, unadulterated, child-hating heresy. (I’m sure the testing company appreciates this passionately inflexible more-is-always-better orthodoxy. It would appear to serve their bottom line far more incontrovertibly than it serves children. There is a raging argument over whether this amount of testing is good or bad for children, but there is no argument whatsoever about whether it’s good for business.)

Can the stakes ever be too high? Is it even possible for an overemphasis on testing to pervert the true experience and meaning of a child’s education? Is it true–as I’ve read from some who are now trying like mad to salvage their precious, threatened device–that the number of tests is not the problem, “it’s the stakes”?

Maybe the tests’ advocates should’ve thought about that before they lost the trust of thousands upon thousands of parents by walloping their kids and their schools and their teachers and their communities and their property values mercilessly with unreasonable stakes tied to these tests. Once the customers get food poisoning in your restaurant, you may not be able to get them back by swearing up and down that the problem wasn’t the food, it was just the way it was prepared. But I guess it doesn’t hurt to try.

By the way, when parents say that their kids are taking too many standardized tests, maybe–stick with me here–maybe there are too many standardized tests.

Or are all the critical concepts I’ve listed here merely the excuses of lazy teachers?

Read the comments at the link above and consider that it might be possible, prevailing memes notwithstanding, that in opposing overtesting, educators across Texas might just be acting in the best interests of their students and not selfishly serving some deep-seated need to avoid accountability for the quality of their work. Hard to fathom, I know.

I was a huge sports fan until I had children and they took over the television set. I miss sports, and I suspect that I should probably give up my man card since my TV sees about a million times more Spongebob than it does college hoops. I was especially a major league baseball fan. I learned to turn the TV volume down and turn the radio volume up (to listen to their apparently superior commentary) from my best friend’s dad, the same man who taught me to pour peanuts into the bottle Dr. Peppers I would buy at our town’s little grocery store when I was a kid.

I collected baseball cards–my dad still has them in the attic, and I’ve got some great rookie cards. My favorite was always Tony Gwynn. What I loved about Tony Gwynn was his statistics. He was a working-man’s baseball player. He didn’t lead the league in home runs. He would hit a few, but he wasn’t really a power hitter. Instead, year after year after amazing year, Tony Gwynn batted over .300. He hit lots of singles and doubles. He got on base. I appreciated the “nothing flashy, just consistent” ethos of Tony Gwynn.

I think I’m the way I am because I listened to the band Alabama too much as a kid. They constantly praised all things “working man” in their lyrics. They had a song entitled “40-Hour Week,” for crying out loud. In another song, they sung “We all picked the cotton but we never got rich,” and said that Wall Street fell “but we were so poor that we couldn’t tell.”

When billionaires bash teachers as they are wont, there’s something deep inside of me–something sown there by Tony Gwynn and the band Alabama–that reacts very strongly. I’m no card-carrying unionist–I’m from a very rural part of right-to-work Texas, after all–but I expect hard-working people to get the respect they deserve. Respect in our politicians’ often reckless rhetoric, for one thing, but also respect in terms of adequate wages and decent health care and doggone it a fair shot at the American dream.

But that isn’t really what I want to write about today. Today I want to write about statistics, like the ones I loved on the back of Tony Gwynn’s gritty, gum-scented Topps cards. Though I complain constantly and vociferously about our testing and accountability systems in education, I don’t have a problem with data.

Data is absolutely vital for us as educators to be able to do our jobs. The problem is that the pushiest of the education data-systems people are incredibly un-picky regarding which data they use, and how they use it. I support things like the Opt-out movement not because I’m against the measuring of learning, but because I recognize that the measuring of student learning is a.) being done with giddy yet gross impropriety, and that the data generated is b.) being used perversely with great abandon.

I heard a great commentary on my way to school yesterday. I hesitate to admit that this commentary was on NPR. (It is my hope, as always, that none of my friends or family will read my commentary.) Anyway, the commentary was about a basketball statistic.

It was fascinating. “Deflections: The Unofficial Stat that Meaures Success,” it was called. (Thank you, Internet.) In short, the commentary was about a handful of coaches that obsess over a statistic that isn’t an official statistic: the number of deflections a player achieves during a game. The statistic is a little fuzzy: there is no set definition of a deflection, though it clearly has something to do with changing the direction of the ball from its intended path, and different coaches count different things as deflections. But it’s exceedingly useful, and one coach noted that, “If you got 35 deflections, you’re going to win 95 percent of your games.”

It’s a hustle stat. It means the players are going after the ball. The commentary notes that this statistic is used to shame players into hustling. How is that different from the use of test scores to shame teachers into working harder? In a very big, very clear way.

Here’s the money paragraph: “The great beauty of the deflection is that it makes the ephemeral tangible….Telling a player in a timeout to “play hard defense” is vague, and telling him to get a steal is requesting an outcome.”

Why is deflections a better measure of hustle than steals? Because the person you’re guarding may be really, really good at protecting the ball. Likewise in education, the person you’re teaching may be really, really good at not studying. Test scores are an outcome, but they aren’t really a hustle stat.

The data-system folks are right: just as it isn’t enough to tell players, “Go after the ball,” it it isn’t enough to tell teachers, “Teach better.” But what they have done–the crucial mistake of all the well-meaning but inexcusably clumsy data people in education–is they have “requested an outcome” and done so with the happy pretense that, “They just ought be be able to get their kids to pass these tests.” Simple as that (unless you’ve actually tried doing it.) They aren’t looking at a hustle stat–something squarely in control of the teacher. They are just saying, “Get your kids to pass these tests.”

That isn’t totally in the control of the teacher, is it? The learner has a role in outcomes, as does the learner’s family. Some students guard ignorance like Steve Nash protects the roundball. But this purely outcome-related statistic ignores the role of learner and family out of either political correctness or convenience, because the state has no leverage over them. So the teacher is expected to merely “overcome” when the other parties to the task are recalcitrant. Then, teachers in neighborhoods where academic achievements are “easy pickings” are endlessly praised for their excellent results.

I hate that about education policy.

But I would love a hustle stat, if there is such a thing. You can argue that this is exactly what a Value-Added Measure is, but it isn’t. Value-Added Measures seem like junk science and have been shown to bounce teachers from the “You’re a great teacher” column to the “You stink” column and back with whiplash-inducing rapidity. Value-Added appears to be condeming an outsized proportion of teachers in inner city schools, according to my casual reading. I think VAM is an attempt at a nuanced statistic, but it has failed so far to gain any sense of legitimacy with teachers because it doesn’t perform as advertised and it railroads teachers who teach the most challenging “ball handlers.”

Maybe we should ask teachers what measure they value? Unfortunately, in education policy today, we operate from the assumption that teachers don’t care much about poor kids and how they turn out. I have seen otherwise, and I personally believe teachers want the best outcomes possible for all students, and they want that even more deeply than the billionaires who trash them.

Mark Strama is a good dude. He’s a state representative in Texas–a Democrat from Austin–and he cares deeply about education, and he knows a lot about it. He has already announced that he’s retiring at the end of his current term, and that’s too bad. Speculation is that he may run for mayor of Austin.

Rep. Strama said kind things to me once when I testified before the house education committee. He appreciated my Alamo Letter, he said. Then, in 2012, he came up to me after I gave a speech at Save Texas Schools and said, “You should do this for a living.”

So it’s interesting that, despite by heartfelt admiration for this guy, I often disagree with him. He’s what you might call a “reformer.” (You have to understand that that word is a slur among my friends and allies.) I say he’s a reformer because he defends much of the current testing regime in Texas and nationally. In fact, last week when the Texas House voted overwhelmingly to scale back on the number of standardized tests and turn toward a customizable graduation path that didn’t attempt to force every child into college, Rep. Strama was one of only two representatives to vote no. He also questioned me pretty hard two years ago as I testified in favor of a complete moratorium on testing. He understood my concerns, but he felt turning away from test-based punitive accountability was a mistake.

So, it’s tempting for me to lump Rep. Strama into this camp with “the enemy.” But I can’t. His heart is in the right place. He wants education reform–and he wants abundant standardized testing–for what I guess you’d call all the right reasons. When you read his eloquent defense of his “No” vote–found at his blog–you get the sense that his heart is squarely in the right place. He is clearly aware of the misuses and abuses of testing, but he’s also keenly aware of the danger to minority students and communities if we completely erase mechanisms that seek to guarantee–nay, force–academic rigor. The biggest fight of the day during the debate over HB 5 was when Rep. Strama debated and eventually joined 49 other representatives in voting for an amendment to adjust the default setting for 9th graders to the “Distinguished” level. Such a move would require them and their parents to come to the school and request to be moved “down” to the normal path.

I understand why Rep. Strama and others wanted to do this, though I couldn’t disagree more. The House did the right thing by rejecting this amendment that was an attempt to keep the status quo of well-meaning standardization of children. The concept of “a higher bar” and “a lower bar” has been, in my experience, remarkably detrimental to the human endeavor of providing children a valid and personally relevant education. I understand that college enrollment is a boon for children from impoverished backgrounds, and I understand the urge of trying to force them to go in that direction. The approach favored by those who backed Strama’s “distinguished first” amendment would seek to whip schools so they’ll herd more kids into the college-bound holding pen. In my opinion, although this mechanism is flawed, the desire that gives rise to it is noble, and the sought-after outcome is worthy. But it’s still a mistake because it’s clumsy and it ruins the whole education system and has–because what Strama was asking for is exactly what we’ve been doing for years–created a cloud of shame and unworthiness intended to follow our young men and women of all races who choose to reject college attendance as their personal goal in life in a pretty cruel effort to dog them into some college seat.

We have essentially attempted to create a generation of accomplished welders, plumbers, and electricians who feel badly that they became what they became in life. As the son of a retired Dallas firefighter, I resent this well-intentioned elitism. My dad is one of the biggest successes ever to put on an oxygen mask and run into a burning building, and I–as a kid from a town where from time immemorial graduates have been fairly likely to go to work for a pipeline company or build fences or attend nursing school–wholeheartedly reject the philosophical construct that a life of vocation is one iota less productive or worthy of praise than the Bachelor-degreed life.

So there’s that. Do we as a nation need more low-income students going to college? Absolutely. Is the way to get there by telling all children they are on the college-bound track until they drag their parents to school and have them sign a paper insinuating that they’ve already failed to become successful human beings?

The cost is too great.

Parents and students have this thing called human agency. I like the acknowledgement of this in HB 5. We have traded the constraining philosophical construct of “a high bar” and “a low bar” for a new construct, that of “a menu” of diverse offerings. Because, you know, people are diverse. If HB 5 survives the Texas state senate–which is hot-to-trot for things like parent triggers and vouchers, by the way–9th graders will walk into school free to choose an endorsement–essentially, the high school equivalent of a major.

What the reformers have done to education in Texas–and what they wanted to do with Strama’s amendment–is akin to telling all college freshmen that their default major is medicine, and that they can only change that to something like education or agribusiness by coming in with their family and openly confessing their sins of low expectations. Who thinks something like that is okay? It seems very unpleasant and not really respectful of individual differences–automatically categorizing some as moral or intellectual deficiencies–among people.

Rep. Strama and others will likely interpret the rejection of the amendment as a “watering down” of expectations. (The Dallas Morning News already has.) I see it as a blossoming of human agency and freedom. Suddenly, it’s okay for school officials to say, “You want to be a welder? Let’s get you there.” (In the past we were required to gasp, “What? You don’t want to go to college? Tsk, tsk.”)

Anyway, maybe it’s clumsy and blinkered to say we need more low-income students going to college. Maybe what we need is more turbo diesel mechanics coming from our poorest neighborhoods and earning $60,000 a year after five years on the job. I don’t feel like a heel suggesting that. Maybe there are those who think I should. I’ll call them the “college or bust” crew.

In my immediate family’s history, the trajectory toward college took a couple of generations. My parents earned high school diplomas, and my dad got a good job with middle class pay and decent benefits. Mom and Dad made the expectation that we four children would go to college a centerpiece of family life. And we all became teachers. Now all of us teachers are pushing like mad to get our children to go to medical school or engineering school or pharmacy school–some profession that pays more than teaching and comes without the constant stream of “we hate you” rhetoric from politically-affiliated think tanks and ambitious politicians who want to bash schools in order to justify privatizing them.

Anyway, my disagreement with Mark Strama isn’t over whether it’s a good idea to get more children from poor and minority communities into college. It certainly is, and I admire all who are doing the work to make that happen. At the same time, I feel that getting more kids onto the college path by burning the ones who opt out at the stake is a really colossal error. I refuse to only celebrate poor kids who get into college. I will also celebrate poor kids who choose the military or diesel mechanic school or who graduate and get a good job with a pipeline company.

The reason people like me call NCLB and RTTT “one-size-fits-all” policies is because they are. And here in the trenches of education where I live and work, I am telling you that one size doesn’t fit all.

Rep. Strama notes in his blog post that minority students have improved their results under the harshness of these constructs he favors. I’m sure they’re performing better, but there’s something else that is wholly unexamined. You can’t conclude that those numbers cleanly indicate improved outcomes for poor or minority students without first controlling for the strugglers who are “dropping out but not dropping out,” who have been purged from the system and chased by tests like TAKS and STAAR into the waiting arms of one of Texas’ fake home-schooling diploma mill operations where even a dog can graduate.

You may think this is a rare phenomenon, but as a high school principal, I lost 70 students to such an operation in one academic year. I’m convinced that the exodus was a direct result of my “high expectations” for behavior combined with the state’s “high expectations” for testing and the diploma mill’s alleged penchant for offering a $100 discount to current students for each new student they recruited from the surrounding area. One girl chose the diploma mill because I punished her for violating the dress code. Her dad cursed me out, told me our rules were stupid, and withdrew her to the diploma mill. More tragically, I remember a student–an accomplished and popular one–who checked out and opted for our local unaccredited home-school-diploma-granting “private school” as a senior because he felt he couldn’t pass the exit-level TAKS math test. I hated to see him choose that option, because in my mind he was my dad all over again. But I will note bitterly that–although I tried to talk these struggling students into staying in school–my school’s scores went up and I looked like a pretty good principal. And let me say that this scenario hasn’t gotten better. I’m at a different school now, but I’ve seen students from my new(ish) school unenroll and opt for a quick and painless home school diploma from the same aforementioned “private school”.

Because we as a state have forced public schools to dishonor the non-college-bound, many have opted for a divorce and are running into the waiting arms of diploma mills who will take them (and their money) just as they are. Many kids have figured out “they won’t hassle me if I drop out as a ‘home schooler’” and have found “diploma”-granting institutions waiting to accommodate them (and not subject them to TAKS or STAAR) in our state’s shadow school system. Mark Strama should look into this, because the mallet of high standards is right this minute still chasing kids into a much worse situation than the vocational “dumping ground” he so fears.

Cantankerous and vociferous public education advocates like myself have been pretty quiet in Texas this year. Sure, there was another Save Texas Schools rally and there have been quite a few opinion pieces about some of state senator Dan Patrick’s more obvious attempts to privatize public ed. But really, we’ve been fairly subdued. I’m proud of us.

For the most part, we are being good because we are cautiously optimistic that there will be a legislative course correction from the ludicrous “Every child is going to college whether they like it or not” graduation plan silliness, as well as a stepping-back from the nationally-leading travesty of Texas-sized overtesting that Pearson’s lobbyists have dragged our kids into.

However, I see a new outrage brewing. I predict this will boil over soon.

To encapsulate the problem I see in the fewest number of words, I’ll just repeat for you the observation I have heard multiple times this week from fellow superintendents and colleagues in other roles: If our lowest-paid employees choose middle-level family insurance coverage from the TRS ActiveCare menu, they will actually pay more for insurance than they make in salary. They’ll have to write a check at the end of the month for the privilege of working.

I went through this great museum in Thurber, Texas. It was dedicated to the town’s interesting history as a coal-mining company town. Workers there often “sold their soul to the company store” and found themselves living as de facto indentured servants, owing more money to their bosses than they earned. I thought, “How wicked and unenlightened we used to be.”

Turns out we aren’t that different today. The regular person in rural Texas–the person who opts to serve the community by serving lunches to school children or cleaning classrooms, or even the Bachelor degree-holding first year teacher, their real take-home pay for providing a needed service in our society is untenable. The stinginess of the Texas business lobbying class is forcing good, productive, hard-working people to feel increasingly desperate.

The monthly premium for the lowest level of high-deductible coverage for an employee and her family in Texas public schools is rising from $850 per month to $1060 per month.

Meanwhile, the lowest rung on the Texas teacher pay-scale, if you work in a district that is inequitably funded and can’t afford to pay above the state’s minimum scale, is $2732 gross monthly. That’s before holding out 6% for retirement and whatever percent for income tax and Medicare. Public school employees in Texas don’t receive social security benefits, even though most have paid in at least some quarters during periods of non school employment.

Now a typical response of private sector employees when hearing about the woes of low pay and waning job security among teachers is “Welcome to the club.” But I don’t get that. Two bullied children shouldn’t argue about which one got more lunch money stolen; they should team up and demand an end to the bullying.

It isn’t really the teachers as much as the support staff that I’m worried about. Custodians, bus drivers, lunchroom workers, classroom aides, clerical staff, and maintenance workers are typically paid on a percentage of the local teacher payscale. This means that literally–without hyperbole–many Texas school employees cannot cover their families and still have any pay left over to pay the light bill and eat food. This is especially true for the lower-wage employee who looks at the high-deductible option and realizes, “There’s no way I’m going to ever have the $4800 family deductible PLUS the $4200 out-of-pocket maximum, which excludes deductibles and copays,” and opts for the middle coverage (TRS ActiveCare 2) at $1323.00 per month for a family.

This is a travesty. It should be called ActiveDon’tCare.

What’s even more terrifying is the realization that under the law they will no longer be allowed to just decline coverage, which is what many employees on the low end of the pay scale were doing in Texas schools just to be able to survive.

Meanwhile I’ve been told by acquaintances familiar with two state departments outside of teaching that non-school state employees can get family coverage at a monthly premium that is far less expensive. Apparently the state supplements the ERS system–the system for state employees who aren’t teachers–at a higher rate than it does for teachers. No love for the teachers yet again in this state.

One superintendent who was visibly angry about what this was doing to his small town workforce told me about a teacher whose husband works for the Department of Public Safety and was able to get coverage for the whole family for around $500. That’s hearsay, I guess, so maybe it isn’t true, but that anecdote was followed up by a family member who works for a state agency reacting with shock at the premiums teachers will pay.

The people under that pink dome in Austin must have absolutely no sympathy for the working class in this state. This is unconscionable.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to review the Bill Analysis of an amended bill (C.S.H.B. 5) that is soon to be debated on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives. If passed, this bill will enact MAJOR changes to the education system in Texas, with a particular focus on accountability and testing. It will also greatly impact graduation plans, among other things.

Let me say right here at the outset that I’m one of those people derisively referred to as “anti-testing” by folks who never saw a standardized test they didn’t want to purchase from Pearson so they could pull kids out of their instructional time to administer it. Never mind the fact that I’ve assigned hundreds of quizzes and tests to assess student learning over the years. Whatever. Advocacy for reasonable restrictions on a thing is always painted as an absolute ban on said thing by rhetoricians on the proliferation side. Luckily, the vast majority of Texans are just as “anti-testing” as I am.

This bill represents a new direction in educational accountability, a direction we desperately need to take in the Lone Test State. The system described in C.S.H.B. 5 is different than our current system of educational accountability in several important ways, including: it replaces rigidity with choice and flexibility; it replaces the sorting and ranking of kids and schools with the describing and differentiating of them; it replaces a negative punishment-centered system with a positive reinforcement-centered system, obsessing not over some narrow, mean-spirited menu of deficiencies but focusing on the beautiful array of proficiencies that our diverse students and schools bring to the table; and it replaces a top-down, distant command-and-control scenario with a locus of control much nearer to the student and the teacher. It honors the integrity of learner and teacher, rather than insulting them by dictating everything from Austin, as if they don’t know what’s good for them. That’s called local control, and you’d think with all the big talk about how conservative our leaders are around here, local control would be the default setting in our government. Wrong. If your locality wants to implement a vocational-focused career-ready curriculum, you can expect the nanny-staters in Austin to attempt to revoke your autonomy, because local voters and the trustees they elect clearly don’t know what’s best for them. Sure you have freedom, so long as you do what they want you to do. (Sorry. Soapbox.)

Anyway, this system moves us toward a more nuanced and accurate portrait of how our schools are doing. That is, it moves us closer to the truth. If the old accountability system was a club, this system is a scalpel. Plus, it moves us away from teacher-shaming toward a diagnosis-and-treatment approach for our struggling schools.

I would like to use my commentary today to highlight 23 things in the bill that I like, and one thing that I don’t like.

LIKES

1. The bill replaces the “minimum,” “recommended,” and “distinguished” graduation plans with a single “foundation plan” for students. This is a clear move away from the meanness of our ranking and sorting fetish.

2. It expands the authority of local school boards to offer certain locally-developed college prep classes. Anytime the locus of control is moved closer to the student and his or her parents, it’s a good thing.

3. It allows students to gain a high school fine arts credit through participation in a non-school activity (such as a community theater, perhaps). Choice and flexibility.

4. It allows students to earn their required foreign language credit by taking a computer coding language. Even though I was a Spanish teacher, I love this idea. Choice and flexibility.

5. It allows a Special Education student to substitute an academic or career and technology course for the foreign language requirement. Choice and flexibility. Special needs students especially need the ability to customize their educational experience according to their individual strengths and interests.

6. It allows students to graduate with a “distinguished level of achievement” denoted on their diplomas and transcripts. This seems similar to the cum laude honors given out at college graduations, as opposed to the “distinguished diploma” that cheapened the recommended diploma and particularly the minimum diploma under the old system. Under this system, we are giving stellar students a pat on the back without simultaneously back-handing all the other, less stellar kids. (Essentially, Texas’s former system had an abiding meanness problem. This system gets away from rampant unnecessary swipes at students and teachers.)

7. It allows students to graduate with “endorsements” denoted on diplomas and transcripts. These endorsements can be in STEM, business and industry, public services, arts and humanities, and multidisciplinary studies. I have a particular weakness for letting people–including students–be who they are. This is one of my favorite aspects. How hard is it, and how much does it cost, to let each kid pick his interest area and work toward an endorsement in that field? I see this as supremely RELEVANT, and relevance is always good in education. Endorsements are kind of like college majors, and I think many of us in the trenches of public education have wondered for a long time why high school students couldn’t pick an interest area and pursue it explicitly during their high school years. Endorsements move us away from ranking according to how well the pegs fit into standardized holes and toward the simultaneous recognition of students who may fit extremely well into a variety of hole shapes. (You know, like that plastic child’s toy with the star-shaped and crescent-shaped slots in it. Multiple kinds of competencies isn’t synonymous with low standards. My dad is a million times more competent than me with wood and tools even though I can probably beat him on a grammar test. But I’m definitely not smarter than that man.) This moves away us from our entrenched win-lose mindset and toward a more humane and effective win-win mindset.

8. It allows for “performance acknowledgements” to be denoted on diplomas and transcripts. Between “distinguished levels of achievement,” “endorsements,” and “performance acknowledgements,” students have multiple avenues they can take to strive for a pat on the back. Everyone likes acknowledgement and praise. Many of today’s most disengaged students have gotten that way because they’ve given up on earning esteem in the school system because the avenues to esteem for students have been narrowed to just one–do well on the test. Barring that one skillset, you get no love. This begins to fix that.

9. This system reduces the number of mandatory high stakes tests to just five: English II writing, English II reading, Algebra I, US History, and Biology. Better still, the high stakes tests are spread out across the first three years of high school. This protects class time, and it protects our teachers from being treated over and over again during the school year like Pearson’s pack mules, lugging those accursed plastic tubs full of testing materials up and down the halls and staring blankly at test-takers for four hours after reciting Pearson’s soulless test administrator scripted liturgy.

10. It makes the decision of whether or not to count a student’s end-of-course test results in their course averages a local district decision. Again, when the locus of control is closer to the people affected by the decision, the less resentment the decision will engender, and the more appropriate for the local context the final decision is likely to be.

11. This system will make two tests optional for kids who want to take them: English III and Algebra II. The idea is to check students’ college readiness. I am assuming that all college-bound students will be encouraged to take these tests, but maybe not (see number 15 below). This is positive, once more, because it distributes power and responsibility and education-ownership to the students.

12. I need to read the actual bill to get clarification on this one, but the bill summary says the Algebra II test will be administered with the “aid of technology.” I take that to mean that calculators will be allowed/required, though I had a second thought and decided it might mean that the test must be given online. Either way, I’m in agreement. Graphing calculators have amazing real-world-relevant capabilities and our students need to learn to use them. Online testing is–aside from the inevitable glitches and downtime–very convenient from a “I’m sick of getting all these boxes and packages from Pearson and sorting and storing junk from Pearson and boxing stuff up and mailing it Pearson” standpoint. Plus, with an online test, results come back incredibly quickly.

13. Students won’t be mandatorily required to retake a test if they don’t succeed on it. Again, I like the onus of this decision being on the student rather than dictated by distant rulers.

14. Unlike under the STAAR legislation–which, let’s be honest, was really remarkably bad–students who pass the test will not be permitted endless retakes for any reason. Someone who made that decision had never dealt with student (and parent) competition for the top spot in the class. If allowed to remain, there is little doubt that many, many students would be taking and retaking the test just to try and get over whatever line might exist to get into the college of their dreams. It’s practical, operational stuff like this that should help our legislators to remember to at least have actual practitioners in the room when the business lobby is trying to make our state’s educational decisions.

15. It allows students to substitute their successful scores on tests like the ACT, SAT, PSAT, and ACT-Plan for their end-of-course test requirements. Again, this is flexibility and choice. It also addresses the concerns of those of us who imagine Pearson’s seven-headed lobbying monster slinking up and down the Capitol hallwyas pushing for more tests, more tests, more tests even long after the amount and centrality of testing grows detrimental to children. (That already happened, by the way.)

16. The bill requires that school ratings be constructed from a variety of indicators, including a minimum of three that are not test-score related, dropout-rate related, and graduation-rate related. The “school reformers” will gasp here. Their orthodoxy holds that there exists only a narrow list of objective measures of school quality. They are, of course, incorrect on that count. There are a million different data points we could choose to use to compare schools and their outcomes. One of the easiest points of criticism I’m able to level against the whole school reform movement is how they say “we measure what we treasure” which of course also means “what we don’t test, we detest.” Mary Ann Whiteker at the latest Save Texas Schools march encapsulated this concern very elegantly by listing the things she treasures that STAAR doesn’t measure. That sappy throwaway line essentially means our Spanish teachers are worthless, doesn’t it? (Sorry, dear wife. The state doesn’t treasure you, apparently. But I do.) We don’t measure CTE effectiveness or about a million other things that students and parents and teachers value wholeheartedly. The best student welder in the state of Texas gets nothing for his troubles except local praise, because Texas leaders only treasure math, science, English Language Arts, and social studies? Bah. I treasure a whole lot more than those, and so do parents.

17. This bill requires TEA to publicly post school ratings by August 8. Having the ratings available to the public quickly–and all of them hopefully found in a single, central, easy-to-access location–will do much to advance a more coherent, easy-to-understand school accountability system. The system we are currently under has never been particularly streamlined or user-friendly.

18. Local communities (boards, superintendents, and committees including non-school personnel, if I read it right) will grade campuses on parent engagement, student engagement, and compliance, using something like a rubric from the TEA. The grades for these things will be on an A,B,C,F scale–just like the new school ratings. I like the local input into a school’s accountability rating, and the similarities of the easy-to-understand systems.

19. I also like the fact that under this bill our school academic ratings and school financial ratings will be reported in the same way, and at the same time. Previously, parents (and some of the less intelligent superintendents, like yours truly) had a hard time sorting out the accountability rating and the SchoolFIRST rating and the federal accountability rating. This doesn’t help with the federal thing, but it at least helps align the financial and state academic ratings. Like many grown-up boys, I like unification of disparate purposes into convenient packages. I think every boy at some point had a Swiss Army knife knock-off and loved it. I had one with a fork and spoon once. I never got caught out in the woods and had to survive with only my wits and my awesome fork-spoon-knife–I mostly used it to eat microwave raviolis, and that was only for like the first two days after I got it. (After that it lived in my sock drawer.) But still; it was comforting knowing I had it. Just the idea that one tool can do so many things–like a Leatherman–does something for the male brain. (Maybe the female brain too; I don’t profess to know anything about that topic.) I don’t know, there’s something about the way we’re wired that we want to consolidate our tools when we can. That’s why the iPhone was such a hit. We didn’t have to carry an iPod and a phone anymore, which was a giant hassle–it was an all-in-one device. It even had a calculator and a calendar and Angry Birds. That’s how a school accountability system should be. It should be a multilane highway instead of several parallel dirt roads.

20. Under this bill–at least by appearances, we’ll see post-implementation if they ruin this–distinction designations appear to be reported with no less enthusiasm than school ratings. Under the old system, it always felt like sneering words like “Academically Acceptable” got trumpeted from the mountaintops while the “Gold Star Acknowledgements” or whatever they were called were kind of whispered. It was up to the schools to try and make a big deal of their distinctions, which came out (if I remember right) at a different time than the actual front-page-worthy ratings. Under this bill, distinctions will be required to be released simultaneously with the ratings. Hopefully newspapers will report them with equal enthusiasm as the spankings public school teachers receive.

21. Schools will get distinction designations for raising overall scores, for closing achievement gaps between subpopulations, and for boosting scores in the various specific tested subject areas. This was one of the (few) features of the new STAAR accountability system that I was looking forward to. I like how it keeps pressure for improvement in place on us, but it does so by honoring rather than shaming. I’ve always wished our legislators would recognize that school people have never complained a whit about programs like the US Dept. of Ed’s “Blue Ribbon Schools” program, even though it honored select schools and left out the vast majority. See, there’s a difference between publishing the A honor roll–nobody minds an aspirational system–and publishing the F honor roll. We’ve been eagerly doing the latter with schools, and I’ve always wanted to say, “We would never do this to kids!” Because it wouldn’t work to motivate them. It would only make them resent and hate the system. Which is exactly what our past accountability system has done for educators. No one likes statutory meanness and rigid unfair treatment. These obtuse business dudes took over and eagerly shamed struggling schools, teachers, and students, thinking that would make the educators try harder? Or maybe their actual goal was simply the devaluing and desolation of public education? Anyway, this bill appears to move toward a more aspirational, less accusatory and blame-centered system. And that’s good, because we aren’t all going to be above average, and being below average doesn’t mean you’re bad if all ships are rising. Half the schools are always going to be in the bottom half. That isn’t called an emergency. It’s called math.

22. This bill requires the TEA website to host all the school ratings. Technically I guess that is already the case, but the AEIS reporting system is very cumbersome and the reports are essentially impossible for the average Joe to read and comprehend. My hope is that the spirit of this bill will be for all school ratings to be found at a simple, straightforward, well-publicized, easily accessible site. I hope it isn’t buried on the TEA website, but that the TEA is permitted to build a new website with an easy-to-remember URL that parents, educators, and journalists can remember, that becomes the hub of school quality information. TEA and our legislators might check out the schools explorer app over at the Texas Tribune and take notes. Fewer lines of data and more colorful graphs and charts would be good. There could be a link to the data for people who want to swim in numbers. Most people don’t.

23. The Top 10% automatic admission rule into state colleges will be reserved for students graduating with the distinguished distinction. That’s a good idea.

DISLIKE

1. This bill does nothing to reduce the 17 high-stakes tests that elementary students must take in Texas, even though the federal government only requires something like eight high-stakes tests. The Parker County Coalition will be publishing a letter in the next few days that clearly lays out an elementary testing regime that maintains accountability while protecting class time and aligning the state system with federal requirements. It’s sensible, and it doesn’t “water down” accountability. I love how any reduction in the number of times we weigh the cows is postulated by the guys who sell the scales as a “watering down” of our monitoring efforts. What a load. If left to their devices, they would have us test every day. Every single day. And not because that’s what’s good for kids. They know and deeply care about what’s good for business. They have spent a decade shutting up teachers who challenge the “pull-them-out-of-class-and-test-them-again” philosophy by denouncing those teachers as kid-haters, by questioning their personal integrity and their professionalism when they challenge the need for all these tests. I think teachers are finished allowing test-pushers to bully them into letting data-system salesmen, industry advocates, business lobbyists, and test pushers abuse education for their own ulterior motives.

Sorry. Soapbox.

Anyway, C.S.H.B. 5 is a very positive development, in my opinion. I’m sure there will be interested parties who try very hard to find ways to protect Pearson’s giant lobbying investment in the past monstrosities that have sailed through our statehouse. I’m hopeful that the organizations and the parents and students and teachers who care about a quality, locally-controlled education will call their Representatives and let them know that this is a good bill, and that it doesn’t need to be saddled with test-and-data-company-benefitting amendments on the floor of the House. Let’s get Texas back to the business of educating children, and out of the business of guaranteeing annually-rising testing profits.

Sorry for any typos. Banged this out between 7-10pm last night and 5-6:30pm this morning. (And now I have to hustle to get to work on time! No time to proofread.)

New Questions About Trips Sponsored by Education Publisher

Pearson Rakes in the Profit

Sixty percent of adults who took standardized test bombed

Breaking News: Adults’ Test Scores Released in Providence!

Brookings’ Brown Center Report Surveys State of US Ed

School closings will open door to other problems

TFA sponsors reform propaganda videos

The Great Deception

How big is the school counselor shortage? Big

Magical thinking about technology in education

Native Americans Challenge Teach For America in New Mexico

Closing 80 Schools in Chicago Would Be Psychological Warfare

‘A-Plus’ Countries Falter on International Math Study

Working Across Political and Ideological Lines

It’s the Students, Stupid

Student Responsibility for Learning

When it comes to testing, listen to teachers

Ohio Town’s Lengthy Teacher Strike Splits Community

Arguing about school reforms that go nowhere

AP good for high school, bad for college?

Update: Growing Criticism Of LA Reform Campaign

First off, the word “accountability” has been so abused that it is now practically useless. It’s like a sock whose elastic is shot but we keep pulling it out of the drawer and slipping it on, only to have it sink around the bottom of our ankle. It’s time to toss it in the trash and get out a new word, one that actually means what it means. I suggest–thanks to Pasi Sahlberg’s wisdom–educators retire the word “accountability” from their discourse as it is perverted beyond repair and instead substitute the word “responsibility”. The pundits and politicians can keep beating the accountability horse if they want. Practitioners should say “We’ll see your ‘accountability’ and raise you some personal responsibility.” Where I’m from, the constituents and voters love personal responsibility.

The problem with accountability as it has been employed is that, by virtue of being misplaced, it has come to actually mean “unaccountability” for certain key players. What I mean is this: if you have a goal to accomplish as a team and only one member of the team faces consequences for losing, such a scenario will not really promote a united focus on the importance of outcomes.

The accountability movement is built upon the premise of holding teachers accountable for student learning. That assumes that the student is a passive vessel that the teacher must fill. This movement is ultimately disempowering and suggests that students bear no personal responsibility for their own learning.

Our culture is so thoroughly messed up that we now not only have helicopter parents protecting their kids from the consequences of their actions; now we even have a helicopter government stepping in to blame teacher Mrs. Smith when student Jonny Jones gets too hung up on Minecraft to complete homework assignments or study for tests.

The responsibility movement would not hold teachers singularly accountable for as noisy a data point as student test scores. Are student test scores a pure measure of teacher effectiveness? No, of course not. A student test score is the result of an amalgamation of influences. You can’t legitimately in any field but education beat Person A for Person B’s performance unless Person A has some leverage over Person B and fails to use it.

From a teacher’s standpoint, student tenure causes more problems than teacher tenure. Reformers love to say, “The problem is we have bad teachers who have jobs for life. How can administrators get good results if they can’t get rid of bad teachers?”

But a teacher could say the same thing, unless they work in a “no excuses” charter school or a private school that has the ability to expel for any or no cause. (Essentially, those schools have the operational advantage of “at-will students.”)

In the “real world” of business and industry, managers are indeed held accountable for the productivity of their subordinates. But they have leverage that teachers lack. Because education is a democratic right–thank goodness–these teachers are stuck with certain students who aren’t on board. (And this isn’t a negative because the other option appears to be to deny such a kid an education and send him packing. This other option, despite the disingenuous protestations to the contrary, is the de facto death of universal education for children.)

Teachers can’t fire ineffective students. Traditional schools can’t fire them. So our governments have said, “Well, we need to fire someone when the student doesn’t pull his weight. Let’s fire teachers and administrators.”

This approach has indeed gotten teachers and administrators to focus on the data and the subpops and to work and worry their rear ends off. Many teachers are fairly depressed right now because it is corrosive to the human psyche to get spankings for someone else’s sins, but some teachers are super-motivated by the challenge of “getting their students there.”

What we have seen in my state under TAKS is that student performance on the exit level test that counted for graduation has always far exceeded student performance on all the other tests that didn’t affect the student. Teachers begged 10th graders to take TAKS seriously because they felt their jobs were on the line, and the conscientious ones did. But not all teenagers are conscientious, and not all teenagers want their more rigorous teachers to maintain their employment. So some 10th graders blew off a test that didn’t impact them personally and only truly impacted their dear old alma mater and its various employees.

So the teachers pretty effectively complained about this, and our legislators responded by making the new test–STAAR–count as 15% of the secondary student’s course grade. Now students had some skin in the game.

Now, I’m not suggesting that teachers’ organizations are this smart and prescient, but in hindsight it almost looks like this was a chess move that would result in checkmate four moves into the future, because once parents and students found themselves in the position teachers had been in for years in Texas–your future rides on a one-shot test now–a storm erupted. Students and parents said, “This isn’t fair.” Teachers said, “I’m telling ya.” And they all called their legislators.

They couldn’t waive the 15% rule fast enough. Nobody wants skin in this game because it’s a stupid game. So now we are back to tests that students take but that really mainly devastate teachers. The assumption that students give a rip about the test–or even, in many cases, about their own learning–is just an assumption. And I’ve never fully embraced the student-disempowering gospel that the teacher and not the student is responsible for student learning. Yes, great teachers can motivate many students. But not all students.

I watched Michelle Rhee and Bill Maher on YouTube yesterday, and Maher tried to argue that poverty and parenting impact learning. Rhee said no, it’s the teacher. Neither said some students are brats and with or without poverty, parents, or teachers some students are going to succeed because of what is inside them. As a culture we apparently want to blame the ground every time our little angels scrape their knees, and it’s a little pathetic and a lot hobbling.

Anyway, to prove her point, Rhee told an anecdote about a tough boy she saw in class who was totally engaged. This was first period. She asked him about the class and he talked about what a great teacher this was. Anyway, conveniently, as Rhee was leaving the school (to go ask the Koch brothers for some walking-around money, maybe) she followed the engaged student out the front door of the school. Never mind that this story probably isn’t any more true than her 90% pass rate as a teacher in whatever inner city school she ate bees in. She asked the kid where he was going. “My second period teacher doesn’t inspire me,” he said, or something equally rhetorically handy.

Let me just unpack Rhee’s assumptions. First, she assumes that this student–a school skipper–is an honest arbiter of teacher quality. How does she know that second period teacher isn’t a million times better than the first period teacher? Maybe the student doesn’t like him because he’s too rigorous? Maybe he doesn’t let the student listen to his headphones?

Maybe he really only goes to his first period class because there’s a pretty girl in it, and Rhee’s radar didn’t pick up on that?

Maybe the kid doesn’t like the second period subject and he projects his distaste onto the teacher?

How can we as a nation follow the cavalier lead of people like Rhee with these enthusiastic blind spots that allow them at every turn to assume that the students are wholly pure and that if there is a problem it is the teacher’s doing?

This is not only ludicrous; it is counterproductive and by devaluing the efficacy and impactfulness of student choices and purposes, it harms education and our shared national future.

Accountability as it has been redefined is by definition the misplacing of consequences, the freeing of students and policymakers of responsibility for their actions. Our teachers now carry their own burden plus those of the students and those of the funders. There is no educational failing today that we can’t pin on teachers.

This system stinks. And this system has made teaching perhaps the least attractive long-term degreed career in America today. It’s fine for two years, if you’re the missionary sort. But eating dirt for thirty years isn’t very sustainable, and those who make it to retirement under today’s mixed up system are special people.

If you like being blamed for other people’s sins–people over whom you have no leverage because if a failing grade is the worst thing you can do to me and I really don’t care about grades–come teach.

Bill Maher takes on Michelle Rhee

Confessions of a black school reformer

$43,056 bonus to charter teacher at ‘D’-rated school

Really? Test Prep for Homework!

Better to work with the schools we have

Race to Top Winners Can Apply for Extra Year to Finish Work

States Team Up for Technology Purchasing

Helping Education Leaders Grow

Broad Foundation Bails Out State’s Emergency District

Panel Rejects Proposal to Stop School Closings

Wall St. likes Philly public-school closings

UFT Wants Curbs on Mayoral Control

Mississippi Tells Public Schools to Develop Policies Allowing Prayers

Common Corn

Wow, I take one short vacation and I miss all the excitement. This past week–Spring Break, for some of us–a new national organization appeared, aimed at protecting and preserving the crucial American institution formerly known as public education (re-christened sometime around 1983 “the utterly failing system of government schools”). Read more.