Do test scores make good teachers

Want to see a magic trick?

First distant authorities define good teachers as those who raise test scores, then they use test score gains to determine who's a good teacher.

Okay... it's not magic... it's called circular reasoning, and it's one of many logical fallacies that people commit when discussing education.

How do we fix this?

First, we must all understand that test scores likely tell us more about what the student brings to school than what they learn in school. In other words, test scores are influenced more by factors outside of the teachers control.

When it comes to test scores, the inconvenient truth is that, most of the time, good teachers are made by good students.

Reading between the lines of lower test scores

This was written by Phil McRae who is an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teacher's Association. This post first appeared here and is in response to the Calgary Herald's Editorial.

by Phil McRae

The Calgary Herald editorial asserts I portrayed Alberta students’ declining scores on an international standardized reading test as “good news of a sort.” This assertion is untrue and offensive.

In the original interview about recent international test results, I addressed three significant concerns, none of them good news of any sort.

First, I raised an alarm about deteriorating conditions in Alberta classrooms. Communities across our province are feeling the pressures of a booming economy. Teachers are not immune to these forces and have been struggling with much larger classes and declining resources and supports for students with complex special needs.

Contributing to this complexity is the fact that about one in every four Alberta students is learning English as an additional language.

Despite these challenges (and others such as the stain of child poverty), Alberta’s 15-year-old students continue to rank second in the world in reading according to the latest Programme for International Student Assessment results.

Second, the Alberta Teachers’ Association, along with the medical community, is concerned that research indicates children as young as eight years old are spending between five and eight hours a day in front of screens (smartphones, video games and televisions).

Those who work with children, families, schools and communities are asking serious questions about the effects of online digital activities on health and mental well-being. Of particular concern is how late-night screen time decreases sleep quality and quantity and negatively affects children’s readiness to learn and read.

Finally, I talked about reading enjoyment and how an obsession with standardized testing in Grade 3 might impinge on it. Research out of Ontario shows that the percentage of Grade 3 students who said they “like to read” declined radically from 76 per cent in 1998-99 to 50 per cent in 2010-11.

Standardized tests emphasize ranking, promote timed reading skills and encourage students to become good test-takers. Standardized testing in Alberta’s Grades 3, 6 and 9 transforms reading into an uninspiring, tedious chore.

Teachers in Alberta are striving to cultivate in students both proficiency and lifelong enjoyment of reading. When children and youth read well, it establishes a solid foundation for learning and engages them in one of life’s great pleasures.

If we are to improve students’ reading, we must identify and address the real challenges facing children and youth in our classrooms. Alberta teachers greatly appreciate the efforts of Postmedia newspapers that participate in Raise-A-Reader campaigns. It would be helpful if the newspapers would make the same efforts to explore the complexities around students learning to read, rather than focusing on the single issue of test scores.

Test the students, Punish the Teachers

In her article in the New York Review of Books titled No Student Left Untested, Diane Ravitch describes how asinine New York's new test-based accountability scheme is:

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

If you start with unreliable and invalid data and you add multiple measures you still have unreliable and invalid data.

There's good reason no high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students.

More on Evaluating Teachers

Some architects of the test and punish accountability movement claim that through value added measurements (VAM) they are able to better use student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Well, the truth is they still can't.

In their report titled Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Background Paper for Policy Makers, Linda Darling Hammond, et al. write:

1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable. Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.

2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Who Are Assigned to Them. Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are advantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and others with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students.

3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress. Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores

.

Reduced to Numbers

"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." 

-Albert Einstein

Last year, teachers in Los Angeles suffered under the LA Times printing of teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores.

This year, New York teachers are the target of a naming and shaming operation that took place when the New York media published evaluations that ranked teachers by their students' standardized test scores.

There's a lot wrong with all this and Diane Ravitch aptly explains how reducing the quality of a teacher to a score and then making this unreliable and invalid data public is nothing more than a ploy to undermine public confidence in public education.

The problem here isn't just that these teacher evaluations and rankings were made public -- although making them public certainly does make things worse -- the real problem here is that the complex work of teaching is being reduced to a number at all.

Teacher evaluations via test scores are prone to such error that they are not valid or reliable regardless of whether they are public or private.

After reading one New York teacher's response to being labelled "below average" despite what other anecdotal and qualitative evidence suggests, I took note of one of his points:

As with many things in life, teaching cannot be simplified into an algorithm.

What if the logical conclusion of this line of reasoning is that the most important things that happen in school cannot and should not be reduced to a number?

What if Rog Lucido is right in saying:

We delude ourselves into thinking we have measured learning because we uncritically accept the premise that 'learning is measurable'.

How many teachers are demoralized or angered about having their complex work reduced to a number but then go to school the next day and do exactly that to their students?

With every crisis there comes an opportunity. Could it be that there is an opportunity for us all to see that neither teaching or learning should be reduced to numbers?

If there's a silver lining to all this I hope it is this:

It wasn't until the system tried to grade teachers that teachers could finally see why they should not be grading students.

For more on abolishing grading from school check out this page.

To join a movement for abolishing grading, check out The Grading Moratorium.

You might also want to check out Alfie Kohn's article The Case Against Grades.

Judging Teachers via Test Scores

I've written before that the US is the anti-model for how to reform education.

Well, they are up to it again. This time New York has released a new way of evaluating teachers.

Diane Ravitch explains:

Last week, the New York State Education Department and the teachers’ unions reached an agreement to allow the state to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The pact was brought to a conclusion after Governor Andrew Cuomo warned the parties that if they didn’t come to an agreement quickly, he would impose his own solution (though he did not explain what that would be). He further told school districts that they would lose future state aid if they didn’t promptly implement the agreement after it was released to the public. The reason for this urgency was to secure $700 million promised to the state by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, contingent on the state’s creating a plan to evaluate teachers in relation to their students’ test scores.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.

But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

As an Albertan, I have seen signs that our education system is perhaps moving in a very different direction than the US.

However when I see someone like Jim Dueck featured in the Edmonton Journal, and Rutherford talk radio show, I get worried.

I get worried because Jim Dueck is involved in reviewing applications for competition for federal funding under Race to the Top. And it is because of Race to the Top that many states are marrying standardized test scores to teacher evaluations.

Next time someone like Jim Dueck gets air time on the radio or face time with the minister of education, I wish they would bring all this to the public's attention.

Canadians should not be too quick to dismiss the idea that the lunacy of high stakes standardized testing, vilification of teachers, merit pay and other corporate reforms can come to Canada.

The 49th parallel does not offer some kind of inherent insulator to this madness.

We must all be aware that all it takes for destructive education reforms to become reality is for good teachers, parents & students to say and do nothing.

Test scores: To what end?

For those who wish to elevate the importance of test scores, here's a question:

What exactly do you have in mind, pedagogically speaking, beyond bullying teachers and kids to get higher scores on bad tests?

Rewarding & punishing students for test scores

An Orange County High School was using a student ID colour-coding scheme to visibly rank and sort students according to their scores on standardized tests. The Orange Country Register reports:

Kennedy High School in La Palma is requiring students to carry school ID cards in one of three colors based on their performance on the California Standards Tests – black, gold or white – plus a spiral-bound homework planner with a cover of a matching color. The black card, which is the highest level, and the gold card give students a range of special campus privileges and discounts, while the white card gives students no privileges and forces them to stand in a separate cafeteria lunch line.

There is so much wrong with this that I'm not sure where to start... but here goes:

• Students should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information. Psychological research tells us that there are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Not only are there two different kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic, but they also tend to be inversely related. That is, when one grows, the other tends to shrink. Because of this, adults have no business ever prying on their children's extrinsic motivation to learn. Also keep in mind that this was both a reward and punishment system; the absence of the reward is the punishment (the stick is hidden in the carrot). If we wanted to extinguish a student's love for learning, I could not devise a better program than this.

• Sometimes with the best intentions, schools end up doing questionable things in the name of raising achievement. When achievement is code for high scores and increasing achievement means nothing more than test scores are low make them go up, reward and punishment schemes like this are as predictable as they are destructive. Ultimately there are two problems with tests: right answers don't necessarily signal understanding and wrong answers don't necessarily signal its absence.  Because tests measure what matters least and often encourage a narrowing of the curriculum and test preparation, low scores on tests is nothing to be ashamed of and high scores are nothing to be proud of. So even if this colour-coded caste system scheme did increase test scores, this at best provides us with no useful information about the school and at worst tells us the school's priorities are about raising scores not raising children. In other words, the goal is as flawed as the method.

• The trouble with this approach is that it intensifies the damage our obsession with testing is doing. Anthony Cody writes about this on his blog where he explains that through branding and labelling a student's worth is literally defined by testsandgrades in such a way that the majority of the children are relegated to a subclass. Cody explains that the quality of a student's learning should never be reduced to a few test scores because the tests can't tell us what we ask of them. Real learning is messy - standardized tests are nothing if not infinitely tidy. See the problem? Or as Alfie Kohn puts it, "I've come to realize that standardized tests serve mostly to make dreadful forms of teaching appear successful."

• Those who decided on this policy may not know anything about eugenics or believe in eugenic principles, but this policy is what a eugenicist would do, under conditions a eugenicist would have endorsed. This is what David B. Cohen wrote about in his post Eugenic Legacies Still Influence Education where he makes the point that this ranking and ordering of students served absolutely no useful educational value. The stratification and segregation of students does nothing but endorse a caste system. While I can see why schools might want to educate student's on what a caste system is - this is not even remotely the same as suggesting we should immerse children in one.

• Campbell's Law tells us that the more any one indicator (such as test scores) are used for decision making, the more that indicator will suffer from corruption, therefore, bastardizing the very processes it was meant to monitor. We can bemoan this inconvenience all we want. We can play the blame game until we are blue in the face, but it won't change a damn thing. We can no more successfully ignore this social science law than we could ignore a law like gravity. 

Since this story broke, the California school district has chosen to discontinue some elements of the incentive plan including the removal of the colour-coded binders and student IDs. They also noted that the incentives of a public nature, such as different lunch lines, would be no longer used. While some may see this as a victory, I don't. The school district has already pledged to create a similar but less public way of rewarding and punishing their students via test scores. This tells me that the only thing they deemed inappropriate about their incentive program was that it was too public and they got caught.

I guess what I'm really saying is that bad stuff will return if it isn't rejected for being bad... and this is bad.

"Overhauling" teacher preparation

I've said before that if we talked even half as much about making good teachers as we do about firing the bad ones, I think we could make a difference, and in the United States there is momentum for overhauling teacher education and preparation. Education Week explains a recent development:

Momentum appears to be gathering behind a U.S. Department of Education plan to hold teacher education programs accountable for the achievement of students taught by their graduates.

At an event hosted here Friday by the think tank Education Sector, a diverse group of stakeholders, including Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association, and Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, spoke in favor of the initiative, which was first outlined in the Obama administration’s fiscal 2012 budget request. ("New Rules for Ed. Prep Are Mulled," March 9, 2011.)

"It’s a really important piece to change the system and to build this profession," said Mr. Van Roekel. "We agree no student should have a teacher who is not well prepared. We agree every candidate must meet rigorous standards. We have to combine meaningful input with meaningful output [data]."

The NEA has generally been wary of value-added test score data. Mr. Van Roekel said that its use in general continues to give him pause, but it shows promise for being used in the aggregate to help teacher preparation programs improve.

Through a negotiated rulemaking process, the Education Department wants to streamline and rewrite the reporting requirements contained in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Colleges of education participating in student financial aid currently must report information on candidates’ pass rates on licensure exams and identify low-performing programs.

Among other steps, the Education Department would require education schools to report on three new measures: how much their graduates help students learn; whether teacher-candidates are placed in high-needs subjects and areas; and whether school administrators are satisfied with the quality of program graduates.

Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee already link teacher education graduates to student records, while 11 states and the District of Columbia have committed to similar initiatives through the federal Race to the Top program.

I'm all for improving and overhauling teacher preparation in order to improve the teachers that work with our children so that they are experts on how children learn, but not like this. This kind of overhaul is just another way of doing more of the same -- that is, using test scores to not only track students, but now track teachers. When people say "how are we going to hold teachers accountable" what they really mean is "how are we going to punish teachers". Tracking students, and now teachers, via their test scores actually helps legitimate these punishments by offering a new way to derive them. The stick used to be hidden in the carrot, now it's hidden in the data.

Marc Tucker, the president and chief executive officer of the National Center on Education and author of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform:

We contrast the strategies that appear to be driving the policy agendas of the most successful countries with the strategies that appear to be driving the current agenda for education reform in the United States. We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States, and, conversely, that the education strategies now most popular in the United States are conspicuous by their absence in the countries with the most successful education systems.

"Overhauling" teacher education by marrying student test scores to teacher records is being sold as a daring departure from the status quo when really it is a tactic taken from same same strategies that have been strangling the life out of classrooms for decades. The accountability mantra behind this kind of teacher preparation reform goes something like this: High test scores indicate good teaching because good teachers have high test scores.

I think Alfie Kohn summarizes this kind of teacher preparation overhaul nicely in his post What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities:

A productive discussion about who's a good teacher (and why) is less likely to take place when the people with the power get to enforce what becomes the definition of quality by default: high scores on bad tests.

I don't expect the founder of a computer empire like Bill Gates, or a lawyer like Joel Klein, or a newspaper editor to understand the art of helping children to understand ideas, or of constructing tasks to assess that process. I just expect them to have the humility, the simple decency, not to impose their ignorance on the rest of us with the force of law.

To fight back, an awful lot of teachers who have been celebrated for their students' high scores -- those teachers who can't be accused of sour grapes -- will have to stand up and say, "Thanks, but let's be honest. All of us who work in schools know that you can't tell how good a teacher is on the basis of his or her kids' test results. In fact, by being forced to think about those results, my colleagues and I are held back from being as good as we can be. By singling me out for commendation -- and holding other teachers up to ridicule -- you've lowered the quality of schooling for all kids."

If you aren't disturbed enough by how data (test scores) are driving education reform and teacher evaluation, I suggest you read the dangers of building a plane in the air.

Send us your winners

When school is bastardized as nothing more than make test scores go up, don't be surprised if schools give you high scores in ways that alienate and marginalize the very students who need school the most.

When accountability is simply code for punish low scores, don't be surprised when private schools and charters build their mission around send us your winners and we'll make winners out of them.

University of Saskatchewan waives provincial and diploma exams

The University of Saskatchewan now waives provincial and diploma exams for admission and scholarships.

Their rationale goes like this:

• We don't want to penalize you if you have a bad test day.
• We don't believe your future should ride on the success of one set of tests.
• We have confidence in our teachers and trust their ability to assess students.

For Alberta, Northwest Territories and Nunavut Students:

• Diploma exam marks are no longer required! We will take the mark that workds to your best advantage - your in-class mark or your diploma exam mark. It's just that simple. So when you write your diploma exams, don't get stressed! We'll look at your entire academic career, not just those three intense hours. We're the first university in Canada to do this - just another University of Saskatchewan advantage.

This is yet another example of how post-secondary institutions are grasping how little test scores actually tell us about a learner and that while some might believe tests have their place, we must all remember to keep them in their place.

What effect will this move have on other colleges and universities in Canada?

Test Score Ambiguity

The problem with using test scores to tell us something about a student, teacher, school or community is that there are far too many variables.

Here's a question from the book The Myths of Standardized Tests:

If 85 percent or more the students in your child's classroom or school meet or exceed the proficiency standards, that means: 

a) your child has an exemplary teacher.
b) your school has an exemplary principal.
c) both a and b.
d) your school community is wealthier than average.
e) all, any combination, or none of the above.

While it may be true that inside the classroom the quality of the teacher has the greatest influence on student learning, the rest of the world outside of the classroom is much larger -- which is why testing experts like Harvard's Daniel Koretz warn:

A great many things other than the quality of schools influence educational achievement, and the impact of these noneducational factors can be huge... 

People routinely misinterpret differences in test scores, commonly attributing more to quality of education than they ought... 

Trends in scores over time, whether down or up, are often influenced by social factors and, in the case of seeming improvements, by inappropriate teaching to the test. Not all low scoring schools offer as weak an educational program as their scores might suggest. By the same token, if your neighborhood schools have high scores, that may mean less about the quality of their programs than you'd like. 

 The point to be taken here is that when we ask tests to be a window into the quality and quantity of student learning AND an educator's teaching, we are asking test scores to do something they can never do.

I need test scores

Show me someone who says they need test scores and I'll show you a teacher who is likely forced to teach too many kids in a class, day, month, term or year...

or...

... I'll show you someone who isn't a teacher at all and never spends time with kids but needs numbers to make decisions that will affect teachers and students.

Either way, the need for test scores by the former or the latter are not needs to be accommodated - rather they are problems to be solved.

Once teachers are afforded the opportunity to come into contact with an appropriately limited number of kids and decisions about education are made by actual educators, we would find ourselves needing test scores less and less.

So the next time someone says they need test scores, ask you might say: That's nice, but what do the kids need?

If we are to use test scores...

If you are familiar with my blog, then you know I am never one to advocate for the use of test scores.

However, I will say this: If test scores are ever to be used, they can only ever be used by the teacher who has assessed the individual students while using multiple sources of information.

Without knowing the child and without having access to all of the other kinds of information only the classroom teacher is privy to, test scores in the hands of the government will only ever do more harm than good.

So if governments wish to continue to use test scores, they need to find a way to include the teacher's professional judgement.

Merit Pay

If you thought merit pay was a good idea, or that test scores are a good indicator of who the good and bad teachers are, think again. Dan Willingham takes you through this 5 minute video showing you how test scores are anything but easy to read.

The Culture of Public Education

In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this on culture:

Instant cultures are artificial cultures. They're big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules. They are obvious, ugly and plastic. Artificial culture is paint. Real culture is patina.

You don't create culture. It happens. This is why new companies don't have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.

Today's high-stakes test and punish accountability is bastardizing our school's culture. In a queer attempt to count and measure our way to better learning, we are poisoning our classrooms.

Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

A school that is about raising test scores is not a school that is about excellence and love of learning.

Kohn's words are strong and rightfully so. Test scores are a fraudulent fabrication that are fatally undermining education.

Want proof?

Stop giving tests. Stop talking about the results. Stop discussing this 'need' to raise them.

And you will find that learning will persevere. Tests could cease today and learning would prevail tomorrow.

You see, learning is natural. And so can assessment, if done correctly. Let's simplify; two things must happen to conduct summative assessment:

1. Gather

2. Share

What may surprise you is that a teacher need not ever use tests to properly gather nor do they ever need to use grades to share.

In his classic book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn explains:

There's good reason to think that the best teachers do not rely much on pencil-and-paper tests because they rarely need them to know how their students are doing. Teachers who base their practice on a constructivist theory of learning are always watching and listening. Everything from the kinds of tasks assigned to the way the classroom is organized has been designed to help the teacher know as much as possible about how the students are making sense of things. This kind of informal assessment is continuous, making things like quizzes very nearly superfluous. We might even say that the more a teacher needs formal tests to guage student achievement, the  more something is wrong. (With direct instruction, of course, the teacher is talking more than listening, so traditional exams would be seen as necessary.) As parents, we shouldn't be worried about those who need to give frequent tests because they may have no feel for how their students' minds work.

Kohn then provides this powerful classroom teacher's testimony:

In the real world of learning, tests, and reports and worksheets aren't the most meaningful way to understand a person's growth, they're just convenient ways in a system of schooling that's based on mass produciton... I assess my students by looking at their work, by talking with them, by making informal observations along the way. I don't need any means of appraisal outside my own observations and the student's work, which is demonstration enough of thinking, their growth, their knowledge, and their attitudes over time.

This might all seem quite counter-intuitive. I know it flies in the face of the way I was educated and the pedagogy I practiced at the start of my teaching career, but good teachers understand what Chris Lehmann meant when he spoke at TEDxNYED and said,

What we see with our eyes daily is more important than what students bubble in on one day of the year.

In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Ken Robinson explains further how the public education culture is in trouble:

Most of us can look back to particular teachers who inspired us and changed our lives. These teachers excelled and reached us, but they did this in spite of the basic culture and mindset of public education. There are significant problems with that culture, and I don't see nearly enough improvements. In many systems, the problems are getting worse. This is true just about everywhere...

Children everywhere are under intense pressure to perform at higher and higher levels on a narrow range of standardized tests...

The result is that school systems everywhere inculcate us with a very narrow view of intelligence and capacity and overvalue particular sorts of talent and ability. In doing so, they neglect others that are just as important, and they disregard the relationships between them in sustaining the vitality of our lives and communities. This stratified, one-size-fits-all approach to education marginalizes all of those who do not take naturally to learning this way...

These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century - the powers of creative thinking. Our systems of education put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. In fact, with programs like No Child Left Behind (a federal program that seeks to improve the performance of American public schools by making schools more accountable for meeting mandated performance levels) and its insistance that all children form every part of the country hew to the same standards, we're putting a greater emphasis than ever before on conformity and finding the "right" answer.

Alfie Kohn, Chris Lehmann, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson and Sir Ken Robinson's comments all share a common theme - and that theme is trust. The case against high-stakes tests, grades and standardized curriculums is built on the notion that we must entrust teachers to make professional decisions.

Just as you can't test your way to better learning, you also can't mandate standardized curriculums and bully your way to student engagement without marginalizing a great number of students (and teachers).

A school that is more concerned with raising test scores than raising children has corrupted their culture. Sir Ken Robinson summarizes the sad state of affairs the culture of public education has found itself in:

Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests. Those students whose minds work differently - and we're talking about many students here; perhaps even the majority of them - can feel alienated from the whole culture of education. This is exactly why some of the most successful people you'll ever meet didn't do well in school. Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There's a huge irony in the middle of all of this.

We must provide students with both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment. Rather than forcing students to learn the way we teach, we must teach the way students learn. And equally important - rather than forcing our students to conform to our narrow range of high-stakes assessment demands, we must enlist a broader range of authentic assessments that fit our students' needs.

To continue educational reforms that simply double the dose of high-stakes testing and further narrows, standardized curriculums is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt. Because policy makers have proven so inept at understanding this, teachers must lead the way in advocating for the schools our children deserve.

Narrow measures of learning

Accountability in its current form has an obsession with outputs. And the output that accountability has fallen in love with is test scores.

More and more research is coming out, confirming what Jean Piaget said long ago:

"Anyone can confirm how little the grading that results from examinations corresponds to the final useful work of people in real life."

Whether or not we can or should eliminate testing is a larger and seperate point that I don't wish to try to make here. Rather, I would like to make the argument that we should measure and value educational inputs as much as as we value outputs.

Here are a list of inputs that we could measure and value to determine good schools and good teachers:

• What is the book to student ratio in the school's library? How often are new books bought according to student's interests?
• Is their an intramural program for kids to actively participate in?
• What kinds of opportunities are there for students to go on field trips?
• What kind of inventory does the science department have to facilitate science experiments?
• Are students given the opportunity to learn how to properly use social networking programs such as Facebook, Twitter, wikis, blogs and discussion forums.
• What is the student to computer ratio? Is there reliable internet connection?
• Are there sports teams that take all who tryout and cut no one?
• Are students encouraged and provided time to read for enjoyment?
• Do staff find the time and make the effort to create strong and healthy relationships with their students?

Roger Martin, author of The Opposable Mind and The Design of Business explains, "the perception that good management is closley linked to good measurement runs deep." Too often we become very comfortable with sayings like "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it". Martin explains in his blog entry Management by Imagination:

"however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a 'reality' that is in fact an edifice we've unknowingly constructed around ourselves."

Our misguided obsessive need for data to drive our decisions has placed a disproportionate amount of emphasis on analytical thinking. This is not to say that we should abandon analytical thinking - rather, we simply need to strike a better balance with intuitive thinking (respecting what we know to be true without reasoning)

Until we can strike a better balance between analytical and intuitive thinking, accountability in education will remain on narrow measures of learning.

Lollygag Larry and the layup he wasn't allowed to take

I remember hearing about an ice cream corporate suit who thought he could speak at teacher conventions about how his ice cream company was analogous of education. He would explain that he would only pick the best ingredients - he had such excessively high expectations and refused to ever lower the bar, and so his ice cream company made super awesome ice cream. And so the message was that teachers too must simply raise the bar and have ever-more higher expectations of their students.

I think his speaking days were numbered when a teacher finally had the guts to stand up and say that in her public school, she didn't get to throw away the bad ingredients - meaning that she had to (and rightfully so) accept all the students who attended her classroom. The ice cream man didn't have a response.

This little anecdote made me think too about how we come to guage school's success around their sports' teams. There are only so many spots on the team. I can only imagine how many kids' hearts are broken when they find out that they aren't invited to the next tryout.

As far as I know, most public schools don't have tryouts for grade 8 math. That means we don't get to 'trim the fat' or 'seperate the wheat from the chaff'. All of our 'fat' and 'chaff' show up as test scores - that teachers are to be held accountable for.

And yet, the senior basketball team doesn't need to worry about being held accountable for getting lollygag Larry to nail a layup - they just cut him.

The ice cream company doesn't need to worry about being held accountable for getting stale strawberries to make tasty icecream - they just don't buy them.

And yet, public schools that accept all the Larrys and all the strawberries that show up - regardless of their lollygagging or staleness - are held accountable for these challenging ingredients.

Unfortunately, most of the time this accountability ends up being nothing more than a way to punish schools for unconditionally accepting every student that walks through their doors.