A Complete, Coherent, & Practical Theory on Trust, School Accountability & What Can be Done to Right a Great Wrong in Our Lifetimes

Jan 2025

More than any document created so far, this lays out how educational accountability came to look like it does, but more importantly what can be done about it.

It shows the conditions under which accountability evolved in other professions into a truth-tell trust-building discipline of leadership, and how those conditions have been stymied in education. Once that can be sensed and understood, it can be addressed.

Most remarkably, no leader needs permission or a policy change to do accountability right and take advantage of what that offers for students, parents, communities, and the profession.

What Standardized Testing is and all the Things it is Not

Feb 2024

For as anyone can remember, standardized testing and accountability in schools have ben commensurate with each other. Most school districts with more than a handful of schools have a position titled something like Director of Assessment and Accountability, further reifying this thinking.

But this thinking is wrong. Dead wrong. Standardized testing has always been, and will always only be, a research tool with limited uses. Judging student or school effectiveness has never been one of those uses, and yet for more than three decades the world has presumed otherwise. The consequences of that are huge.

That is not an anti-testing statement, and this is not an anti-testing paper. It is, however, an anti-stupid-use-of-testing paper. 

This paper explains standardized testing in clear, easy to understand terms, which in turn allows educators a way out of a mess.