During the keynote panel for A New Way Forward Summit, Kaleb Rashad argued that it was time to pick a fight with standardized tests and I could agree more! Given that we don’t have standardized tests this year (and most likely won’t have them next year), I can’t think of a better opportunity to not just push back on standardized testing but to come together and design and new and better accountability system, or Accountability Systems 2.0 as Tony Wagner called it. Lynn Moody, superintendent of Rowan Salisbury School District stated the obvious “Students are not test scores.” Yet too often when we are unclear about (or forget) why we do what we do, it is easy to let the systems of efficiency and standardization take over. 

In the last 2 months we have been confronted head-on with the inequities that have existed for far too long and as COVID-19 has required us to shelter in place, it has exacerbated the challenges and opportunities across our world. We have lost lives and many who are disproportionately Black and poor. We have witnessed the murder of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and seen the fallout from the heinous crimes as the protesters stand up and fight back against the injustice. Although we don’t yet know what school will look like in the fall, we know that our students will come back with a new world view, trauma, knowledge gaps, and likely new and different skills and experiences than they would have had in school. The teachers and administrators will have their share of new learnings, trauma, and needs too.

A New Way Forward

Pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

Arundhati Roy

It is a time of reckoning for our world, our communities, and our educational system and it’s an opportunity to imagine the world anew. Many have been working toward more equitable, authentic, and just learning experiences and assessment practices that honor and celebrate how people are smart, not just ranking and sorting them on outdated measures. This is the time to prioritize what matters most and as Kaleb Rashad put it- It’s not just about getting a job. It’s about who you are, who you are becoming, and how we can collectively care for mother earth. This begins with an awareness that if we truly want to develop knowledge in students, we have to know them, love them and help them see the full beauty of who they are and what they can become. And if we have this awareness, we must set our expectations high and align the accountability systems that hold us all accountable for creating systems that develop the knowledge, skills, and mindsets that matter most in each and every one of our students. 

There is often alignment in the vision of what we want for learners– many often share with me that they want them to be happy, successful, caring humans who can contribute to society. The challenge is in how we narrowly define and measure what constitutes success. A hyper-focus on improving standardized test scores can prevent us from the larger goals of developing learners to think, communicate, and be contributing members of society. Educators are not afraid of accountability. We just want to be held accountable to our community for what matters most, 

In the last two months as our schools were shuttered, I have seen educators working harder than ever to meet students where they are, build relationships, and connect on a personal level. There has been a realization of the importance of social-emotional health and a realization of the contexts in which our students live. There has been more empathy, more innovation, and more learning and our education has shifted more in the last 2 months than in the last hundred years. In the midst of chaos, we have the opportunity to evolve. There are many unknowns but it’s not time to despair. It is time to organize, prioritize, and come together in solidarity to create a new way forward. 

3 Steps to Designing A New Accountability Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system. Often the misalignment in what we say we care about and the curriculum we teach and how we measure success creates frustration. We can’t simply say that we are now prioritizing new outcomes for learners without shifting our resources, support, and more importantly success measure and accountability systems. Here are 3 steps to design a new accountability ecosystem.

Step 1: Co-create your North Star

The first step is to determine the hopes, dreams, priorities and get crystal clear on your directional system as Lynn Moody did in Rowan Salisbury School District. It is crucial to engage in more conversations in our communities and seek to better understand answers to the following questions:

1. What type of learners do we want to develop?
2. How might we develop the desired knowledge, skills, and mindsets?
3. How might we assess the desired outcomes?
4. What is the role of the teacher, the learner, the community?
5. What is the role of technology?
6. How can we all work together to achieve our desired outcomes? 

I don’t believe that there are any right answers to these questions, but we can’t assume the answers are the same as they have been in the past. To ensure schools evolve to meet the needs of learners today, it is incumbent on leaders to convene the greater community to examine beliefs about learning and teaching and consider how schools can best serve learners.

Step 2: Determine what matters most to be held accountable for

Too often we focus on test scores, curriculum implementation, program fidelity, or even technology use, but when we stay focused on the learners, all of these tools and measurements become secondary—part of what we do but not why we do it. We can have the latest technology or the best curriculum, but if we are not focused on who learners are, how to best serve them, and how to partner with them to move forward, we can fail to make the impact that we desire and are working so hard to achieve. 

Accountability isn’t bad unless we are focused on the wrong measures, and why Tony Wagner urges communities to come together to hold us as educators accountable for what matters most. 

I have worked with multiple districts this year to define the skills that we want student to learn at grade level bands and identify what it looks like. It is an important and powerful conversation when we can discuss what we actually value and have conversations like what effective collaboration looks like, why it matters, and how to teach it. 

Step 3: Design a system to measure progress.

Ok, so you have community support and a clear north star (AKA Graduate profile or learner profile), you have clearly defined these skills, now how do you assess them? One thing I have learned is that it is easy and often in our DNA as educators to make rubrics and anything that we can check off but this approach rarely grows people and their skills. I have had much more success defining the skills with the community and identifying what already exists to build from a asstt based mentality rather than the deficit approach. These conversations often lead to how can we improve rather than conversations that start with labeling and categorizing people usually halt the desire to improve and progress.

Imagine if we were focused on questions like these: Are students growing in skills we identified as important? Are they working together to solve problems? Are they setting meaningful and challenging goals and achieving them? Are students able to decipher complex information and make decisions about how to proceed? 

A new accountability ecosystem requires a clear vision, aligned competencies, and a mastery-based approach to learning. With clear success indicators, you can track progress on what matters with goal setting, personal learning plans, portfolio systems, student-led conferences, and defenses of learning. These measures allow students to be in the center of the accountability system and involved in the learning, curating, and sharing mastery of desired knowledge and skills, with the support and guidance of thoughtful educators.

Everybody says that it is impossible until it is done. — Nelson Mandela

The time is now! We have an opportunity to align or accountability systems with what we value rather than wait for others with different priorities to do it. For more, check out my conversation on A New Way Forward with Tony Wagner, Kaleb Rashad and Lynn Moody.