Tag Archives: accountability

Be Bold and Emboldened About Your 2025-26 Educational Goals

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Every new school year brings a discussion of the educational goals a school will strive to achieve for its students. This is not the time for a complete rewrite of goals; there is no time to retool for new goals. But August is the right time to confirm existing goals and ensure commitment of all school resources to achieving those goals. In the weeks before children walk into school, be bold in publicly broadcasting your educational goals for your students and embolden all educators to achieve your/their goals.

Achieving educational goals is not a New Year Resolution; be loud, be active, be honest!

Where are your school’s or your classroom’s achievement goals published today? Most often they lie in the humdrum posting of school mission statements, the finer print in newsletters, and are announced on day one but seldom to never mentioned after day one. It is no wonder that so few are achieved. We allow the busy urgency of school days to overwhelm the goals that our school business is supposedly committed to achieve. State and restate your achievement goals every week in order to keep them vibrant.

Educational goals are not like an annual new year resolution. Most of us break those resolutions before the end of January, if not before. First, educational goals are about children, not our proverbial self-promise to lose ten pounds of body weight. Instead of looking at our image in a bathroom mirror, we look at the faces of classrooms of children who are counting on our commitment to advance their education. Each child’s face stands for our promise to cause that child to learn and grow because of our work. Every time we look at a child’s face, we need to tell ourselves “Advance this child’s education today!”

Achievement goals are a public commitment

Educational achievement goals are public commitments to cause children to learn and grow. They are not silent, personal promises to give up late night bowls of ice cream. Publish your educational goals as a school and as individual classrooms. One of the reasons new year resolutions fail is that we keep them to ourselves. We do not tell anyone that we want to lose ten pounds; we make it a silent, personal struggle. Instead, we need to enlist all educators, school parents, and school community in helping our goal achievement by telling them on day one and all school year-long what we will achieve this school year for our students.

There is a positive and active snowballing effect when goals are loudly published. Snowballing occurs when a small effort begins to accumulate more mass and more membership because it is in motion. As goal achievement occurs, individuals want to be part of the snowball; they want to be identified with its positive imaging. We need to celebrate snowballing and proclaim every classroom that is joining in the achievement work.

Achievement is personal

We need to make our educational goals for children personal. Teaching and learning are essentially personal activities between teachers and children. It is extremely personal, yet we always depersonalize the outcomes of teaching and learning. We aggregate the data of goals achievement, and we drop names and drop accountability, usually because we do not achieve the goals we published. Instead, we need to keep the data disaggregated and personal. If a teacher knows that her students’ learning achievements will be averaged with all other students’ data, there is diminished urgency every day to “push” on those goals. We see data obfuscation clearly with high achieving schools whose high averaging practices hide the reality of low achieving classrooms. Or with low achieving schools whose averaging practices hide the reality of high achieving classrooms. We need to disaggregate data to make goal achievement real at the classroom level where achievement is measured. There always is a worry that disaggregation allows data to identify students. The equal worry is that fully aggregated data makes those students disappear. Let’ see – using data to effectively educate all children or using data to hide children who are never fully educated. As our practices are FERPA-compliant, we shall decide to educate all children.

Be bold with honesty

Honesty about goals and goal achievement is a necessity. Too much of our culture today is hammered by “big lying” about data and practices. Without commenting on our “big liars”, consider the big lie effects. Lying makes facts untrustworthy and fact checking is ridiculed. Honesty is what honesty does; it builds trust. We need to talk about our positive achievements, and we need to talk about when we fail to achieve the goals we set. And, after explaining our failure to achieve, we need to recommit ourselves to achieving success by honestly discontinuing failed efforts and beginning new efforts. No one likes to hear that a school or classroom failed to achieve its goals, but they dislike even more the lies that are told to hide the honest facts. Educators, parents, and community will respect honest effort with honest reporting that is followed by honest changes in effort.

This August, publish your student achievement goals. Publish the work efforts that will achieve your goals. Publish and talk about the team commitment of educators, parents, and community to accomplish your 2025-26 student achievement goals. Publish the date of your first reporting of progress on your goal achievements. And publish your commitment to every child in school that they will be goal achievers.

Be bold and be emboldening regarding your student achievement goals for the 2025-26 school year.

If test scores are that important, eliminate all else in public education but testing and test scores

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Tired of the annual and uninformed complaints about student test scores in our nation’s schools? Weary of the complaint that we spend too much money on public education only to create low-scoring students? Annoyed that politicians use public education as a partisan punching bag always taking their hardest punches at our children’s achievement in international comparisons? Peeved that while conservative critics complain about test scores in public schools, they keep shifting public tax funds to parent vouchers for private education?  

It is a wonder that critics are not as vociferous in complaining about athletics because half of the teams in any conference will have losing records for the season, some for seasons on end. Or concerts in which some voices and instruments are out of harmony. Or math teams that fail to solve any higher math problems. Or school bus routes that run late. Of too much pizza on the lunch menu. I am not encouraging complaint for complaint’s sake but simply pointing to the silo of criticism about academic test scores.

To the annual critics of public education who whine about the status of academic test scores, I propose that we give them what they want. Let’s strip everything out of our public schools but academic test preparation, academic testing, and make this the singular public education program of every school. If test scores matter that much, schools should be all about test preparation and test results.

Announcement – Tests Only Matter Schools (TOMS)

Beginning today:

  • The only educational programs approved for children in public schools will be academic instruction in preparation for annual MAPS testing, reading assessment in third grade, and NAEP testing in grades 4 and 8. All other academic instruction, arts, athletic, and activities programs are hereby eliminated from public schools.
  • Contracts for all teachers except those specifically assigned to teach reading, ELA, and mathematics are immediately voided.
  • All children from age 3 through age 13 will attend school five days a week for 40 weeks each year. School instruction will be provided in four (4) ten-week blocks with three (3) weeks of no school between each block. A school day will be four hours in duration beginning at 8:00 a.m. and ending at noon.
  • Parents of school-age children are responsible for transporting their children to and from school each day.
  • Attendance is mandatory with parental incarceration the penalty for student truancy.
  • Children aged 3 through 5 will receive pre-reading, literacy, pre-composition, and numeracy instruction every day.
  • Children aged 5 through 8 will receive reading for understanding, grammar mechanics, composition, arithmetic, pre-algebra, pre-geometry, pre-statistics/data understanding instruction every day.
  • Children aged 9 – 13 will receive reading complex text and literature, advance composition, algebra, geometry, advanced algebra, trigonometry, probability and statistics, and problem-solving instruction every day.
  • Annual MAPS testing will be used to assess each student’s progress in preparing for the national third grade reading test and the 4th and 8th grade NAEP tests. The three-weeks between each instructional block provides reading, ELA, and math teachers time to evaluate each child’s academic progress and plan personalized instruction for the next ten weeks.
  • Only children who are prepared for the third-grade national reading assessment and the NAEP tests will be allowed to take the tests. Preparation means achieving scores of 85% or better on pre-tests for these assessments. Unprepared children will be recycled in third, 4th, and/or 8th grade until they are prepared to take these assessments.

TOMS reduces the cost of public education.

The immediate cost saving will be mind-blowing, and every proponent of TOMS will beat their chest with pride.

  • Teacher and support staff payrolls will be reduced by 90% or more.
  • School administration, counseling, curriculum and instruction, and campus supervision will be streamlined.
  • Athletic, arts, and activities budgets will be eliminated.
  • There will be no need for food services or school transportation.
  • There will be no heavy budgeting for technology education, science labs, art or music studios.
  • The school’s utility costs will be minimized to HVAC, water, and sanitation. There will be no after school/evening programming.
  • School taxes will be greatly reduced. The state’s per pupil formula will fund TOMS and no revenue limit override referenda will ever be needed again.

TOMS succeeds!

The United States will top the annual lists for international student academic achievement, all children will achieve high academic standing, AND the cost of public education will be a pittance of what it is now. The critics of current public education will be able to say, “I told you so.”

Oh, and TOMS only applies to public schools. Children enrolled in private schools will have their activities, arts, and athletics programs because there are no public complaints about test scores in private education.

The lesson.

“We only appreciate what we have when we lose it.” (Isabel Allende)

And “we get what we settle for.” (Thelma and Louise)

If TOMS don’t work for you, please choose future leaders who understand that public education is an investment in our commonwealth and our commonwealth is worth the investment. We are our commonwealth.

Atlas is Shrugging

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Think Ayn Rand and then think 2025. Think John Gault and then think the American commonwealth. Think the consequences of industrial leaders shuttering their talents and then think the American people shuttering their care factor. Think the tenets of democracy and then think the pettiness of empirical rule.

When a slim majority of our electorate believes an egotist will elevate their status and cure their woes, what happens if everyone else shrugs? We are finding out.

Fellow educators, we shall not shrug.

Rousseau, Come Back

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“Education is an opportunity, and children should make the most of it. You can never have too much education.” Guilty as charged. As a principal, superintendent, and school board member, I overloaded children aged 5-18 with too many education requirements and compelling programs.  School was an open frame of time, and I led educators in prescribing as many things as we could for the education of children. We labeled our programs as curricular and extracurricular opportunities and were proud of the total education available to our children. Even after traditional academics, activities, arts, and athletics, we wrapped our arms around atypical school activities, like sailing, bowling, archery, trap shooting, biking and hiking, and electronic gaming and made then school sponsored. Schooling was the full Monty.

Seldom did we experience an existential moment, notably “what am I doing and why am I doing it”, the answer always was “this is good for kids.” Today I am no longer convinced of that answer. I would do it differently. Rousseau, come back!

Nature or nurture should be nature and nurture.

Adults have forever wrestled with the question of the best way for children to learn about the world. Do we let children explore and experience the world and from their natural learning prepare themselves for adult life? Is education the child’s responsibility? Is self-education a natural and adequate phenomenon? Or do we create, pre-plan, and program their education to ensure they learn what we want them to learn? Is education the adults’ responsibility? Does education require direct nurturing?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped us understand the value of allowing children to explore and learn naturally. In writing Emile (1762), he created an educational philosophy aligned with the physical and mental development of a child and their exposure to experiential learning. He said that children learn best through direct interaction with a natural environment that optimizes their curiosity and exploration. Learning should be hands-on and active. He was opposed to adults lecturing children, rote memorization of information, and mandatory school attendance. To Rousseau, experiencing life and its consequences taught children critical thinking, moral, and social lessons that were superior to didactic lessons in a school. Life is full of problem-solving needs and children develop skills to match and meet their needs.

Rousseau’s philosophies live in Montessori, Waldorf, and outdoor education programs. They are apparent in school curricula that uses problem-based, project-based, and inquiry-based education. And they are apparent in early child education’s play-based learning curricula.

Horace Mann provided the contrary view; the education of children is a public responsibility and should be regimented. Mann is labeled the “Father of American Public Education.” He espoused universal, free, compulsory education of all children. At a time when a lack of social and economic status barred children from education, Mann led the movement for common schools that would meld all children into a more unified and democratic society as adults. Mann’s schools were taught by professionally trained teachers and used a standardized curriculum focusing on reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and science. He embedded teaching of common morals, civic responsibility, and character development. Schools were funded by local taxes to ensure that all families could afford to enroll their children. Mann created our educational industry.

Regardless of political leanings today, most adults hold to these as the purpose of universal 4K-12 education.

  • Democracy requires educated citizens, and public education equips children with the basic knowledge necessary for informed decision-making, civic engagement, and understanding their communities.
  • Economic self-sufficiency requires foundational skills for personal and professional growth that contribute to the economy and self-support.
  • Public education instills shared values, tolerances, and cooperation necessary for diverse people to live in a stable and unified society.

Mann’s philosophies live in the WI statutory requirements for teacher preparation and subject area curricular requirements. A quick review of any public school’s vision and mission statements and district policies demonstrates Mann’s influence today.  

Why revisit Rousseau?

We have forgotten to balance the fundamental elements of nature and nurture for the best education of children. We are ambushed by these very misleading and disruptive arguments.

  • The education of children is a national priority that ensures the international dominance of the United States on economic, scientific, and political issues.
  • Through public education we shape the ideological thinking of the next generations. They must be taught the right ideology.
  • Because education is funded with public tax dollars, we demand that all children achieve our predetermined outcomes.
  • Public education is the primary daycare provider for children in the United States. The state has a responsibility for the total welfare of children while parents work.

Each of these is balderdash if we believe that the primary and fundamental purpose of education is to cause children to develop into wholesome, inquiring and thinking individuals who are prepared to participate and thrive in a democratic society. To achieve this purpose, we need to provide balance between nature and nurture.

Too much nature creates a Lord of the Flies scenario, and too much nurture creates a totalitarian scenario. As we bent toward too much dictum in the education of children in the last 30 years, we need to take our adult hands off the throttle and allow children opportunities to learn from their innate curiosities and wonderment.

In the argument of nature versus nurture, who speaks for children?

In my late career thinking, I observe that few adults speak for children. We speak from self-evident biases and for our self-serving needs. Almost all, if not all, critical decisions about the education of children are made by the political negotiations of adults. There are no children at the table or in the room.

In our post-pandemic data, it is clear that when children do not see themselves and their needs being met in their public education, they bail out. The major dilemma we face in this decade will not be the loss of academic achievement and the onset of socio-emotional problems in youth. The problem will be that as children matriculate into middle and secondary education, they lose faith in the efficacy of the education adults deliver to them. Our issues today are not lack of achievement but lack of engagement. We need to reassess the overwhelming manner in which we dictate schooling and life for children and reincorporate more of Rousseau. We need to rebalance the virtues of nature and nurture in the educational development of all children. If we do not, we will stand alone in classrooms that children have fled.

Teach For Enduring and Expansive Learning Not Coverage. Know the Difference.

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“Your teacher covered that last year” or “this semester we will cover” still rankles my professionalism as a teacher. Teaching for coverage means nominal teaching and learning. It means spending the least amount of time engaged in teaching and learning for the sake of topical accountability. Coverage teaching is like the proverbial river that is a mile wide and an inch deep – it emphasizes breadth without depth. In my naivety as a young educator I believed that if something was worth teaching it was worth learning well and that meant deeper teaching and learning. Conversely, why waste time and energy on teaching things we did not plan for children to learn well? I still believe this.

Years ago when I heard my principal or district curriculum leader talk of coverage, I assumed they were generalizing about the amount of information in any grade level of our social studies curriculum and the finite amount of instructional time in an academic year. But they weren’t. “You can’t teach everything in your curriculum with the same level of intensity” I was told. “So, cover it all.” It took me a long and troublesome time to understand this, however understanding did not mean accepting it.

There is a line between coverage and knowing and understanding.

Early on in teacher training, we are taught Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the 1950s Bloom established six levels of thinking, learning, and understanding with labeling that helps us explain a rationale for teaching and learning designs. Seventy years later, I still like how Bloom helps me to add depth to the “wide river” of information we teach. The model below shows a revised taxonomy – the terms have been modified from Bloom’s original for clearer explanation of the cognitive levels.

bloom’s taxonomy revised – Higher order of thinking

Although there is a vertical dimension to the taxonomy, Bloom did not intend for all teaching to involve all six levels. Curriculum planners use the levels as goals for teaching and learning. Some learning, in fact most of what we learn, is meant to be at the remembering/understanding level of usage. Other learning is meant to be scaffolded into a variety of applications, or to inform careful analyses, or to evaluate options and opportunities, and to create original work. Though it looks like a ladder, a user does not use every rung to engage in higher order cognition. Instruction and learning can scaffold from understanding to analyzing, or evaluating, or creatin.

Coverage teaching is the act of “mentioning” without the explicit intention of remembering. There is a lot of mentioning in education. Synonyms for mentioning cause us to smile and acknowledge that teachers mention without teaching. When a teacher “alludes to, refers to, touches upon, hints at, speaks about briefly, broaches or introduces only,” that is mentioning. Children may or may not hear or read what a teacher mentions as an aside. Things that are mentioned are characterized as “things it is nice to know but it is okay not to know.” Like, the value of pi is abbreviated to 3.14. As an irrational number, Pi can be calculated out to an infinite number of numbers but who cares? A math teacher covers or mentions that fact but directly instructs that the usable value of pi is 3.14. Best practice does not include “mentions” in assessments of student learning, although there is a lot of bad practice in the field.

Coverage may be all the questions on Jeopardy that sound somewhat familiar but just will not come to mind.

I think of coverage as the blank space below the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy; it is the noise in the world we are not intended to remember.

Remembering and understanding is the meat and potatoes of most teaching. The information – facts, data, concepts, generalizations, and skill sets we want children to know, we teach with high intention. In the language of backward design, if we intend to test children on something, we intend to teach it well so that it will be remembered and understood.

Direct instruction is one of many teaching strategies most often used when we teach for remembering and understanding.

Children learn the alphabet and numbers, sight words and number facts early as foundational knowledge. In school we use direct instruction to drill and practice and ensure memory of these. Retention theory drives our teaching for remembering – we use immediate drill and practice/repetition to strengthen short-term memory and interval practice over time to ensure what is learned is retained and recalled in long-term memory. In a spiraled social studies curriculum, we teach US History in elementary, middle school, and high school because we want all children to know their national stories. Repetition and elaboration cause remembered learning.

Remembering is a student’s identical retelling of information or identical demonstration of what was taught. We require correct and complete retelling.

Understanding is explaining what was taught with fidelity in the student’s own words and doing the skill with fidelity in the student’s own style. Understanding is using what is remembered and making an inference about it or summarizing it in simpler language or combining several pieces of information into meaningful statement that keeps the significance and essence of what is being combined.

There also is a line between knowing and understanding what we learn and the rest of Bloom – what comes next is the so what of education.

Separating the noise of information from the teaching of remembering and understanding, gets us to the “so what” levels of Bloom where what was learned is applied, analyzed, evaluated, and built upon creatively. These four Bloom levels give us the rationale for why teaching for remembering and understanding are such a large part of our school calendar. Without foundational memory about stars, planets, moons, suns, constellations, galaxies, and a universe(s), nothing we see in the sky above us would make sense. Space would just be space. Lifesaving surgery would be butchery. Agriculture and manufacturing would just be guessing work.

Other teaching strategies become available when students have a knowledge and understanding of foundational information and skills. I use the C3 Framework for social studies as an example of instructing above the remembering and understanding line. C3 (College, Career, Civic Life) uses an inquiry process for students to investigate, expand and integrate their knowledge of civics, economics, geography, history, and the behavioral sciences.

“The C3 Framework, like the Common Core Standards, emphasizes the acquisition and application of knowledge to prepare students for college, career, and civic life. It intentionally envisions social studies instruction as an inquiry arc of interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements that speak to the intersection of ideas and learners.” C3 uses “questions to spark curiosity, guide instruction, deepen investigations, acquire rigorous content, and apply knowledge and ideas in real world settings…”

https://www.socialstudies.org/standards/c3

This is not coverage teaching!

Parallel to C3, curricula in every school subject, from art to woodworking, builds upon information and skills students learn at the remembering and understanding levels of instruction. The front of a refrigerator in most student homes is covered with student drawings and finger paintings. Over time, shelves and walls display how student application of basic information and skills blossoms into more intricate and sophisticated art. Student art displayed in local galleries, libraries, and art shows illustrates how student artists apply of fundamental concepts and skills, analyze and interpret subjects, and create new and original art.

Tech ed students manufacture, ag students grow and cultivate, computer science students program and engage in robotics, ELA writers craft poems and stories, and marketing ed students create businesses, apply accounting, create and manage product, lead and supervise personnel in the pursuit of economic growth. Once students know and understand, they can pursue their personal interests for a lifetime.

Know and be the difference.

There is so much in a teacher’s annual curriculum and so little time that it is easy to fall into the coverage mode of teaching. But why? In today’s world, coverage learning is what any child can achieve using Google or AI.

Two centuries ago, teachers were the source of information and applied learning. A century ago, students could read books for information; it was teacher directed and interpreted learning that moved children to young adults ready for college or work. Today, information sources abound, so much so that it hard to know information from noise. Today it takes a teacher to forge information into memory and understanding. And it takes a teacher to guide, monitor, and mentor how students illustrate and expand their learning. Well-conceived and instructed learning remains a springboard for life’s successes.

There is no time or place today for coverage teaching.