Brave-ed.com (formerly TestSense.com) founder John Tanner reframes the idea of accountability. John’s refreshing and pragmatic approach focuses on the contrast between forward-facing accountability and the imposed accountability processes in place today, in virtually all schools. Hopes and dreams will trump test scores and other traditional data if student benefit serves as the focal point of a true accountability structure. At the end of the episode John reflects on the impact made by his third grade teacher, Mrs. Carlisle. Check out the show notes for more details.
Show Notes
From one career intention to another (3:50)
The pervasive but poorly supported failure narrative (4:00)
Working in the standardized testing world and a shift in thinking (4:30)
Who is at fault? (4:50)
What? No ideas for an alternative? (6:00)
Testing and accountability as commensurate with one another (6:35)
Test-based accountability is not the source of the problem (6:50)
Schools deserve an appropriate accountability system (7:30)
Effective organizations use forward-facing accountability mechanisms (8:30)
Forward-facing issues fail to be emphasized in schools (9:20)
Is backward-facing accountability beneficial? (9:40)
Is backward-facing accountability even possible? (10:45)
Destined or expected to repeat the past, year after year (11:40)
Are schools’ accountability practices truly backward-facing? (12:30)
The pitfalls of backward-facing accountability (13:20)
The positives embedded in accountability (13:55)
Imposed accountability (14:35)
Operating in, and ignoring, a context of ongoing change (16:40)
Identifying effectiveness as a prerequisite for accountability (17:25)
Research and logic do not support A-F grading of schools (18:30)
Both effective and ineffective schools do exist (19:30)
Student benefit at the center of school practices (21:30)
Accomplishment vs. measurement (22:20)
Hopes and dreams (23:20)
Hopes and dreams and the level of “mission” (24:00)
Hopes and dreams for a higher test score? (25:20)
Higher test scores or “getting ready for life?” (26:20)
Parents need to have meaningful conversations about their children (31:25)
Mission vs. mission statement (32:20)
For-profits and non-profits have a handful of missions (33:30)
Public schools tend have more than two dozen missions (33:55)
The biggest issue facing public schools today (35:20)
Next steps for TestSense (37:05)
True accountability’s potential as a national movement (37:35)
Legislative solution or legislative support? (38:00)
Mrs. Carlisle – a great teacher (40:25)
Growing up with a disability and Mrs. Carlisle’s wisdom (40:35)
Accountability processes and frameworks do not need to be unwieldy (42:20)
Episode-specific Links:
David Reynolds: What matters most in learning? The challenge, the thrill, the benefits, interacting with other people or something else entirely? What is the connection between leading and learning? Does change drive learning or does learning drive change? What's more important? Teaching or learning? Is everyone a leader, a learner, a teacher? Want answers? Listen in as we address these intriguing issues through commentary and with guests who share their thinking and tell us their stories. Lead, learn, change.
John Tanner: Will my child be ready to face the world? Will my child be ready for what comes tomorrow? Tomorrow's contexts are different, tomorrow's world is different. If we simply repeated what worked yesterday, we're going to fail in the future. I laughed at that point and told him that he was the problem and he kind of laughed back at me and said, "No, you are."
We hold people accountable for last year's test scores, which are only a subset of any content or domain area, which in turn is a subset of what happens in schools. We don't have a chosen accountability. We don't have a true accountability, we have an imposed accountability. It would certainly be helpful for legislators to give us some runway and some space to really prove that this work can be effective.
First question out of our mouth always should be, but what are we trying to accomplish? The first question should never be, what are we trying to measure? Only about 5 to 10% of what matters in a child's life can be reduced to empirical data. We can ask a parent, what are your hopes and dreams for your child? We can ask a child, what are your hopes and dreams for your life? Nobody ever says, I have a hope and dream of a higher test score. Their hopes and dreams are much richer and much more powerful than that.
David Reynolds: John Tanner shares his insights about the notion of accountability. John is the founder of Test Sense, T-E-S-T S-E-N-S-E. And you can review some of his work at testsense.com. Listen in as John explains the difference between missions and a mission statement and emphasizes the importance of looking forward, not backward as the only way to truly address accountability in schools or any other effective organization. Today's guest on Lead, Learn, Change is John Tanner. John, thank you for taking your valuable time to speak with me today.
John Tanner: Happy to do it.
David Reynolds: John, I've had the pleasure of hearing you speak a few times and I've read some of your work and the efforts you're engaged in in Georgia, in our state right now are extremely important and I wanted to capture some of your thinking on the podcast. And I think your message needs to be heard by as many people as possible.
So let's jump right in and talk about what that work is and why you do it. I know you founded the organization Test Sense 10 years ago now about that period of time. So tell us what transpired before 2009 that led you to that point and your response by describing what your current role is and more specifically, what change are you seeking?
John Tanner: Well, actually that's a great question. My traditional training in terms of education was in a rhetorical theory in English departments. I was deeply interested in language and words and the power behind them and really thought that that would be my career. But I was writing about this idea of how the failure narrative in education seemed to be so pervasive and yet there didn't seem to be nearly as much evidence to support that narrative as you would think given just how pervasive it was.
And so I eventually wound up not going the academic route, but working for educational organizations that were interested in solving some of the really pervasive problems and issues that we had in education. And through that set of lenses, sort of learned the testing world and learned it actually well enough that that became my career for most of the next, I suppose 10 or 15 years.
I was a state test director, I helped build some of the early high-stakes testing programs. I worked for national organizations and others and publishers sort of working through all of the issues around that idea of test-based accountability. And truth be told, I was always a little bit uncomfortable with it, but it took me a long time to really begin to figure out why.
And it was when I was working for a national organization about 12, 13 years ago that I really got the sense that what we were doing in this test-based accountability world just flat out could not work. But I wasn't able to put my finger on it, but I was able to speak pretty eloquently to that fact.
And a fellow came up to me at one of these meetings and said, "I'd like to visit with you for a minute." We did. And he indicated that while he agreed with me, he had some real concerns, and he said he was a legislature. And I laughed at that point and told him that he was the problem and he kind of laughed back at me and said, "No, you are."
And he said, "The issue is that you educators refuse to do accountability when it was really important that you do it." And he said, "I understand how difficult it was. And I understand that we did a terrible job of putting in an accountability system in place, but it's what we did because you really left us no option."
And now that you've done that, or now that we've done that, I should say, the only way for us to replace it is for you to come up with something better. And he said, "Do you have anything better?" And that was a pretty kind of important moment because I did. I could tear down the current system. I could point out its shortcomings and all the pitfalls associated with it.
But I didn't have any kind of a replacement, any thinking that would really qualify in that regard. And that's when my thinking changed. I started realizing that we needed to build a better mousetrap if we were ever going to get past this era of test-based accountability. So I opened Test Sense or I founded Test Sense and about that same point in time, really to go after that kind of a mission.
It was a very slow slog for a number of years, I wrote a book in that period, wrote a bunch of articles. And a couple of things really emerged from that period. And one is that we had noticed that testing and accountability had become commensurate with one another. That was silly, there's absolutely no reason for that, and that's one of the paradigms that had to be broken and perhaps one of the more difficult paradigms.
But the other was that the issues with accountability started long before test-based accountability was around. Test based accountability exacerbated the problem, but we can't look at test based accountability and think that that was the beginning of the issue. In fact, that was just one more step in a much longer process of dealing with educational accountability in a really impoverished way.
And so starting five, six years ago, people began to take notice, they began to get really interested in this work because we weren't starting from the position of saying we hate tests, or we hate the current accountability system. We started from the position of saying, we know how accountability works in effective organizations, schools need to be among the most effective organizations in any community, and therefore, they are deserving of an accountability system designed to get them there.
And that theory of action has then driven us for the last five or six years and driven all of the work that we've done. And I'll be darned if there aren't now hundreds, if not thousands of schools and hundreds of districts that have adopted that same philosophy and are doing work in that direction.
David Reynolds: What is your response to this issue? Do you have something better? What metrics do you think are emphasized too heavily, perhaps other than a standardized test score and which measures might need to take a greater level of prominence and be weighted or promoted and communicated about more than they are now?
John Tanner: Well, the answer to that is actually more complicated than it would seem because it's not so much a matter of selecting a particular set of metrics or indicators, it's how we use and think about them. I guess one of the most interesting and one of the most difficult differences between how we do accountability in schools right now, and the way that accountability works in effective organizations is the direction of that accountability.
In effective organizations, accountability is always a forward facing function. And you can think about that in any number of ways. But accountability in terms of your doctor is not to make you better in the past, but to make you better and healthier in the future. You don't invest in a company, which is a wonderful accountability moment, hoping to make money in the past, but hoping to have a benefit in the future.
You don't hire an architect to build you something yesterday, but to build you something going forward. And over and over and over again what we see is that the accountability moment is always a forward facing function. There are certainly metrics, there are certainly indicators involved in all of that, but the actual accountability is forward facing.
In schools we have very similar accountabilities that we don't pay much mind to, will my child be ready to face the world? Will my child be ready for what comes tomorrow? Will my child be safe when I send him or her to school today? Will they be safe when I send them tomorrow? And all those questions about the past are not irrelevant, was my child safe yesterday? How did we do last year? And so on.
Those things are not irrelevant, they can help inform the future. But there is a fundamental difference between what happens in schools, which is that we impose a backwards facing accountability on everything as opposed to a forward facing accountability.
David Reynolds: It sounds like I sent you these exact questions in advance because the prompt I had coming up next was describe in layman's terms what accountability means and should mean and reference the forward facing concept that is embedded in much of your recent writings. Because I looked at all your blog posts and what you've written is running lockstep with what you're saying right now. And it's clear to someone who just immersed themselves in your work that this is exactly what all your work is about. And we haven't gotten to talk about this before together, so that's really pretty interesting.
John Tanner: Good. This forward facing piece though, it is so painful for those of us in education to deal with. It's just such an enormous paradigm shift. What's really interesting is that when you sit down with a group of industry leaders and you start talking about a backwards facing accountability, I mean, this happened recently, they started to get a puzzled look on their face.
I could tell that something was wrong. And so I interrupted the conversation and I said, "Tell me why you're puzzled." And there were both... there was a large group of educators in the room and business folks. And they said, "Well, we don't know what that is." And I said, "What do you mean?"
And they said, "We don't know what a backwards facing accountability is? We've never thought about it in those terms. So you're helping us think about it, even our work in a very different sort of way, but we never thought about whether accountability had a backwards or a forward facing function. But what we can tell you is we don't know what a backwards facing accountability system would look like."
And we had a really powerful conversation at that moment. And they said, "We couldn't survive if our accountability were backward facing. That's not how accountability can or should work." And we took that a step further. And they said, "If our accountability system were backwards facing, we would probably be forced to simply repeat the past every year trying to get back to someplace that we're never going to get to again."
And you think about that logic and extend it to schools, and we would argue, I certainly would argue that one of the reasons it's been so difficult for schools to change over the past century is because for a century now we have had an almost exclusively backwards facing accountability. A lot of it was informal for the first part of that century, but it's always been backwards facing. And that makes it very difficult for organizations to progress, to move forward, to change in meaningful ways, to adjust, et cetera. So this backwards facing, forward facing one, it's just an absolutely critical piece of this work to understand.
David Reynolds: Are we really doing that? What would you use to say here are examples that make it very clear that we have a backward facing system right now?
John Tanner: The simplest way is to just look at our accountability system. We hold people accountable for last year's test scores, which are only a subset of any content or domain area, which in turn is a subset of what happens in schools. So we're holding people accountable for last year's test scores, last year's graduation rate and so on.
And while those things are not unimportant, they are of limited use going forward because tomorrow's contexts are different, tomorrow's world is different. You think about, just from a safety and wellbeing perspective, the world has changed a lot in the last five years in terms of schools and what happens in terms of really awful situations.
If we simply repeated what worked yesterday, we're going to fail in the future, and the exact same is true when it comes to educating a child, doing instruction, you name it. And so this backwards facing approach, which has a tendency to cause us to simply repeat what we did last year is a good way to set us up to be really ineffective or certainly less effective than what we should be.
There's another way to look at it that I think is more helpful than that, and that is to think about what accountability really is. So if you ask a room full of people to talk about accountability, they'll come up with all kinds of really good terms. It's about responsibility, it's about transparency. You get a lot of people who talk about the military definition, which is, hey, we're all in this together. One goes in, we all go in.
And you get a lot of extremely positive terms and feelings about accountability. Nobody thinks that accountability is a terrible thing. And when we think about accountability, that's what we're supposed to think about. But there's another side to accountability, and that is what happens when an organization or a person refuses to be accountable. When someone is unaccountable, then there's a whole other side to this.
We hold them to account, we hold their feet to the fire. We bring in forms of punishment or sanctions, testing oftentimes becomes. And I'm not just talking about school tests, I'm talking about, we really test people's claims and the things that they're saying. And so when you think about those two forms of accountability, the imposed accountability that we do when we hold people to account, we are expecting them to change their behaviors in a very short term.
We're expecting a coal mine that is operating unsafely to get its act together very, very quickly, or an industrial polluter or a politician or whatever. And so in that sense, that kind of accountability is much less a forward facing accountability than a true accountability, one that's got all of those positive things about it because we're trying to create an instant change.
And so in schools, we have an imposed accountability. There is no doubt about that. It is a hold their feet to the fire, it's very personal to teachers, it's a very short term kind of accountability. It's going to be much easier in that environment to have that backwards facing because it's a much shorter term function. Whereas a true accountability would be a much longer term, it would be a much easier thing to have that forward facing function built in.
So the two ways we know we have a backwards facing accountability is just simply look at the structure of our accountability and that's clear. But the other way we know is when we recognize that we don't have a chosen accountability, we don't have a true accountability, we have an imposed accountability, and that in and of itself lends itself very much lends itself to a short-term approach. And in our case, not even a short-term approach, but almost an immediate past approach.
David Reynolds: Well, that actually makes a very strong argument for the phrase I had not heard before, until you used it in your opening comments, which is this pervasive failure narrative, the backward facing accountability system by default, except for a few people at the right end of probably a bell curve. In most instances of the way accountability is done are always going to have less than stellar results in a backward facing accountability system.
And the instant change that you've mentioned really runs counter to the fact that people are operating in a context of ongoing change and uncertainty about what that's going to look like going forward. So if you're not shifting, I understand you correctly, you're going to forever be stuck in this pervasive failure narrative because the accountability system is backwards. Are those two things connected in that way? Am I understanding that right?
John Tanner: You're understanding them perfectly. And let's think about an unsafe coal mine, for example, because it's a really good example of an imposed accountability that helps us understand why the current accountability system continues to bog us down. So when we impose accountability on an organization, there are two really important assumptions we're making.
The first is that we can identify an effective organization and an ineffective organization. Because if we can't identify effectiveness, we don't have any business making the imposition. And I think in a safe and unsafe coal mine, I think it's pretty clear when we're being effective and when we aren't. And the reason you have to be able to identify effectiveness is because that's the only way that your imposition of an accountability is going to make things better.
Well in schools, the accountability system that has been imposed on us is a test based accountability system, a backwards facing piece. And so let's assume for a minute that we deserved it, let's say that we didn't do accountability or didn't do it well. And whether we think that's true or accept that, it is what happens.
So let's look at that and ask a simple question, which is, can the current system identify effectiveness? Because if they're going to impose an accountability system on us as educators, we have the right to know that they can clearly identify effectiveness and so on. School grades, they're used in Georgia and a lot of other places, 17 states total, the research that has come out, Oklahoma did some wonderful work in this regard.
It says, gosh, well, if you're in A school, that means you're a more effective school than a B school, and a B school is more effective than a C. That's the logic. And what they are able to do is they're able to do statistical modeling that lets them theoretically take kids out of C and D schools and perceive whether there would be an advantage or a positive effect or any effect if that student were educated in an A or B school.
And they can do the opposite, take a student out of an A or B school and see if there would be a negative effect in a C or D school. And your hypothesis would be pretty clear. If the A is a more effective school, then all kids should do better in that school than in the school that they're being sent from. And if an A is the better school and a D is a terrible school, then kids who are sent from the A to the D should do worse. That's just good logic.
Well, guess what? There's no difference. The effect is not there. And that isn't to say that there aren't really effective schools and really ineffective schools, and we can identify those. And when we identify a true really ineffective school, there is no doubt that they are having a negative or a deleterious effect on their students. And that if those students were sent to a truly effective school, then there would be a positive effect.
There is no doubt that there are schools that are more or less effective, it's just that the A through F systems based on tests and graduation rates and so on, aren't identifying effectiveness. So number one, they violate that rule. And that goes to this idea that says, why is it that this backwards facing, or in the case of an imposed accountability in more short-term accountability, why is it that we're not seeing it have all these incredible positive effects and everybody do better? It's because it can't identify effectiveness.
And so we're not only left with an imposed accountability that says we're going to hold your feet to the fire, it's going to be deeply personal, it's going to be short-term, it's going to be largely backwards facing, but it also violates the one rule for imposed accountability that has to be there, in that it cannot identify effectiveness. And therefore, we've got a system that isn't designed to help schools get better, it's designed for something else, not necessarily unintentionally, but we've got to build something that is actually designed to help schools get to where they want to go.
David Reynolds: So for the educator, whether he or she is a teacher or an administrator who operates inside this current accountability system and says these types of forces acting on my work are really outside of my control because it's an imposed accountability system, what are some practical actions that leaders, whether that's teacher leaders or administrators can take to make some shifts where they are and persuasively advocate for learning and for learners?
Because in some of your writings, you talk about the need for all decisions to be made for student benefit and you also mention decisions about school structure and philosophy and practice. But if they all have to be made for student benefit, now I think that's a component of the effective school that you're talking about. So if you hone in on some practical aspects or actions that support that kind of thinking, that seems like that would be helpful for the practitioner to take some action now, despite the fact that they're inside a system that's not functioning as it should.
John Tanner: There are a number of things that come to mind that are simple and that a teacher or an administrator could start doing tomorrow. I'll just run through a few. One of them is that the first question out of our mouth always should be what are we trying to accomplish? The first question should never be, what are we trying to measure? That is a principle or a rule that opens up all kinds of possibilities in this world that is so consumed with this test data and the state accountability.
The reason you want to start with, what do we want to accomplish is because only about 5 to 10% of what matters in a child's life can be reduced to empirical data. And if we start with, how do we measure that, or what are we trying to measure, the probability of us getting around to what are we actually trying to accomplish is very small.
And so start every conversation up, what is it that we're trying to accomplish and recognize that while we can't measure most of what matters in a child's life, we can collect and see evidence of those kinds of things. And so don't start with, what do we want to measure, start with, what do we want to accomplish, would be one very simple principle that people can follow that will tend to be meaningful.
A second one is what we call hopes and dreams. It's unextraordinarily simple, and it seems awfully aphoristic, but it tends to be very, very effective. We've noticed that when it comes to parents and communities and lay audiences who are not professional educators, they have a very difficult time understanding what's going on in the weeds of school. And that's as it should be. We have a very difficult time.
I have a very difficult time as a non-engineer understanding what engineers do even though I rely on them to make sure that structures stand up in my house, doesn't fall down, or builders, or doctors, or lawyers, or any other profession. I also can engage with those people because we're able to engage at the right level. We can talk about the level of mission, if you will.
I don't feel well. The doctor doesn't go into all the kinds of nth degree of detail, other than to say, "Well, let's see what's wrong and let's see if we can make you better." And so too with conversation with an engineer or anyone else. Most parents in America did not have a positive experience in schools when they went to school.
And the question we tend to ask them is, well, what do you need out of schools for your kids? Or what do you want to see for evidence? Or what do you want in a report card? And that's like the engineer asking me what specs do I want on my house? Instead, we need to have a conversation at the right level, and the right level is hopes and dreams.
We can ask a parent, what are your hopes and dreams for your child? We can ask a child, what are your hopes and dreams for your life? For our community, what are your hopes and dreams for this community? And that generates a conversation at the right level that's rich and meaningful and powerful to the point where that can serve as the basis for subsequent conversations.
A parent teacher conference that starts out that way, that becomes the basis for future parent teacher conferences, a conversation between a school and its community sets the tone for future conversations. So the second thing I would recommend is to really focus on those hopes and dreams. The interesting thing, and that we've done this I don't know how many times with community groups, nobody ever says, "I have a hope and dream of a higher test score." Their hopes and dreams are much richer and much more powerful than that.
Since you're supposed to do these things in threes, I'll give you another... I'll give you a third that is, I think, also important. And that is that every child needs the opportunity to get ready for life. We've got a current system with these school grades or labels or whatever we do that actually creates a bifurcated approach to education.
If you were in a school that escapes the consequences of accountability, you are free to get kids ready for their lives. You can put neat programs in place, you can focus on engagement, you can do all kinds of extracurriculars and so on and so forth. If you are a school that can not escape the consequences of their current accountability, your job is higher test scores. Your job is not to get kids ready for life. You'll get there if you can somehow get to the higher test scores.
And a lot of people have accused me of somehow being wrong on that, and yet you look at those schools that don't yet have the high test scores and what do they do? They double up on math, they double up on reading, they do all of these activities that in fact are all about getting higher test scores, not about helping get kids ready for life.
So that balance of rather than having a bifurcated system where some kids getting ready for life and some kids just need to get higher test scores, we need to have a much better balance because all kids need to get ready for life. And there is no denying that kids come to us with very different levels of ability and skill. The odds of us getting all kids to very high levels of academics in the same way is fairly small.
The odds of us getting all kids thoroughly prepared for life after school is fairly small, but we can maximize both of those benefits for kids to a degree that every child can walk across the graduation stage at least prepared for whatever is going to come next to the degree that we're able. And right now we aren't doing that, right now we have a system that encourages a bifurcated approach that I don't find particularly helpful.
David Reynolds: Well, what's interesting about your response to that prompt about some practical steps people could take or actions they can take, at least to me is it's very consistent and coherent with earlier comments. You talked about accomplishment, getting ready for life and hopes and dreams.
And if I'm not mistaken, all of those, big surprise, are forward facing. We're right back to those are all future aspects of school, of a learning experience. So I find that to be extremely interesting and also reaffirming the fact that that's the key, is to have a forward facing accountability system and to start looking at how you capture evidence that those things are in place for kids.
David Reynolds: What types of questions would you encourage parents to be asking at school of their children's teachers or even to their own kids or to administrators or types of issues that they might raise even though it's sort of out of their wheelhouse of expertise, so to speak, and sometimes it can be daunting and they might not want to step there? But what could they do or ask on behalf of their children to be advocates so that these types of things do have a greater chance of happening for them at school?
John Tanner: That's an interesting question. It's interesting because there's always an audience for accountability, and that audience is always those outside the organization who are non-professionals but who have a stake or an investment in what we're doing. And just like we go to the doctor and the doctor works with us at the level of mission, which is our health, or we give our money to a nonprofit and they have a particular mission and we're giving them that money to further that mission and so on, parents need to be able to engage at the same level with schools.
So part of our job as schools, first and foremost, is to define what those topics are. So for example, it could be engaged, interested kids. It could be not bored kids. It could be something around safety and wellbeing. It could be around readiness for college or for the next level of schooling. These are all very common things that no matter which school sit and come up with a list, they always come up with a very comparable or similar list.
So I think that the thing that I want parents to do is I want parents to understand what are those 20 to 25, I guess you'd call them missions that every school needs to be responsible for. Because that's the right level to then have conversations and to say, when it comes to really creating an engaging environment for these kids, can you help me understand what you're doing?
When it comes to the safety and wellbeing of my child, I understand not just that you're creating a safe space for them, but do they feel safe. Because you may have the safest school in the world and it may feel like a prison to the child and they're not in an optimized learning environment in that case.
So part of it is that, I don't know that it's so much that the parents and the community, I don't know that I have really big open-ended questions that they ought to be asking, I think it's beholden on the schools to say these are the 25 to 30 things that matter in schools, which of these is of most concern to you at the moment, which of these do you most want to address and talk about?
And again, I say that because one of the things that we discover in community after community is that especially in communities that have socioeconomic conditions that aren't optimal, most of those people had a bad experience in schools, and even knowing how to start a generic conversation is difficult. But if we can create those topical moments, if you will, the conversations are rich and meaningful and powerful, and no one feels left out or foolish or stupid.
In fact, just the opposite, it empowers the community, it empowers the parents to have really meaningful conversations about their kids. Probably a bit of a cop-out, but I don't know that it's a parent's job to be able to generically ask smart questions of school, it's our job to help them understand what the work is that we're doing so that they have an opportunity to engage in a meaningful way. And again, think about architects or doctors or engineers, that's exactly how we have conversations with each of them.
David Reynolds: That's not a cop-out at all, actually flipping that question completely around was a really appropriate way to respond to that. Because as the educators it is our responsibility to look for parallels, I think, with what parents want for their kids. And more often than not, I believe those will match up.
When you use the word mission, and I'm sure you're fully aware of this, so many people are used to a school having a mission statement. What you're talking about when you say missions or 20 or 25 things that matter most in teaching and learning or in schools is not synonymous with a mission statement. Do you want to talk about that just for a second so that that's clear to educators who are listening that you're not suggesting we create a new extended 25 bullet statement? Because I think that some people may think, "Oh, we just need to be more specific with our mission statement."
John Tanner: No, thank you for that. No, mission statements are great, they're important. They're big and aphoristic, and they're the exact type of thing that you need to help orient and create an overall direction for a school or district because there's not one thing wrong with those. When we talk about the missions of an organization in the accountability world, we're talking about the things that define the organization.
They're the things that if you took them away, they wouldn't be the same organization. And so those are oftentimes not easy to see. So Southwest says their mission is people, their mission isn't flying airplanes, they're a people organization that happens to fly airplanes. You have the Cleveland Clinic, their mission is very clearly, healthy people.
And what happens is that most businesses have two, three, maybe four of those kinds of missions. Now, interestingly enough, in effective organizations profit is never a mission, profit is always a goal, which I think is interesting. But nonprofits tend to have one or two because they've got a charter that defines what that mission should be in a board that's going to keep people focused on that mission.
But schools tend to have 25 to 30 and it's because we're much more complex organizations than virtually anything else. And a lot of things we do rise to the level of mission that don't rise to the level of mission say in a business. So for example, we feed kids because it's our mission to keep kids healthy.
A business would open a cafeteria because it's trying to not have its people go offsite to generate 20 or 30 minutes of extra productivity from everybody during the workday. Those are different. A business keeps its people safe in order to not lose work time, and again, increase productivity. We keep kids safe because it's part of our mission.
And again, it's not that the businesses don't care. That's not it, it's that a lot of things rise to the level of mission in schools. We have achievement and student engagement and interest and safety and wellbeing, and then we have the things that are required in order for us to be a good school, which is really high quality systems and operations and high quality staff and teachers and so on.
And so many, many things rise to the level of mission in schools, many more things I should say, than in a business or a nonprofit or a church or another kind of organization. We recognize those things because without them schools become a profoundly different kind of place.
David Reynolds: Is accountability then the biggest issue facing public schools or public education today? Or is it something else that's connected to that? Or is it getting accountability right?
John Tanner: No, I think that accountability is the single biggest issue that we have to solve in education. And here's why. The current accountability system drives so much, and any accountability system will drive a ton. Accountability is one of the most powerful forces within an organization. And it will orient the work and the people in profound ways. It can't not do that.
And right now our accountability system is orienting schools in a way that's making them less not more effective. But accountability also touches on so many other things, it touches on the narrative around the failure narrative, which continues to this day. It touches on encouraging choice and charter and making arguments for those things.
I'm not going to criticize either of those at this moment, not particularly fans of either of them, but it's fueling a debate or a dialogue there based on false premises. Everything from strategic planning to resource allocation, to the purchase of goods and services from vendors, it is incredible how much would change for the better with an accountability system really designed to help schools be their effective best.
And so I truly believe that until we get that problem fixed, we're holding back on so many of these other things in ways that it's just... we're not going to be able to get to those things, we're not going to be able to solve some of the other really, really big problems we've got in education until we can tackle this accountability piece.
David Reynolds: What about where you're headed with this work next, projects, plans, ideas?
John Tanner: Well, what's been interesting about this work is we have never pushed it nor advertised. All we have done is do the work in every district that will invite us in, in any state that will invite us in to do that. And we are engaged and our hours and our days are completely full. Right now we have a handful of states, and in each of those we're in between 5 and 10, maybe 15% of the school district and the schools that are there. So there is an incredible amount of room for growth.
So our goal is that this become and evolve into a national movement, that we generate interest in as many states, as many places as it's humanly possible. And only then will we reach a tipping point that will allow us to really have a meaningful national conversation about what educational accountability really could and should be.
What we're hoping for long-term, what I'm personally hoping for long-term isn't some legislative solution that takes all of this and tries to adopt it. I think that will, in so many ways, corrupt what needs to be a truly local activity. But we have lots of examples in government where they have taken a senior responsibility in terms of accreditation, in terms of licensure, in terms of all kinds of things can help ensure that we do this with a high degree of integrity and that we're having the effect that we wanted without standardizing the effect, or without somehow insisting that we all operate in a homogenous fashion.
So short-term, we need to get it into as many states as we possibly can and districts. Long-term, we need to figure out the legislative agenda and the policy agenda in order to make sure we have something that can really be sustained without the corrupting influence that can sometimes happen when things move from being a really good idea to trying to put them into policy.
David Reynolds: Are there some practical, real steps, tangible actions then that legislators can take to assist with the shift to an accountability system that really matters and will be more effective?
John Tanner: I absolutely think so. We need the space to do this work. In every place we're doing this, people are keeping a foot in both this backwards facing accountability system as it exists and the forward facing accountability systems that are being built. And while that is not an impossible thing to do because they are completely different, almost independent systems, it would certainly be helpful for legislators to help give us some runway and some space in order to really prove that this work can be effective.
That to me is the thing that in the short term would be more useful than anything. What would not be useful is to somehow put a timeline on it or to insist that we have an immediate effect and it will be a failure. Those kinds of things aren't going to be helpful. But giving us some runway and some space, that would be, I think, the most helpful thing they could do.
David Reynolds: If you would like to share a memory or a shout out to a great teacher or about a great teacher.
John Tanner: Wow. Yeah, that goes to... I think, it goes to my third grade teacher, Mrs. Carlyle. It was interesting for me personally because as someone who grew up with a disability, for those of you out there, you can't see me, but I grew up without a right arm. And it's never bothered me. It's just something that is a part of me and it's never been a concern.
But the one thing that I always wanted to do was to be treated as normal. And I know that may sound really strange. And I never let it affect me. I played baseball, I played golf. It's just never been any kind of an issue. But I also have a little irony in there in that I'm an identical twin and there's a two-armed version of me and there's a one-armed version of me.
And that has always been interesting because you're always looking in a mirror that's not quite a true reflection of yourself. And I think Mrs. Carlyle in third grade was the first teacher I had who really understood something about that dynamic and really went out of her way in a very small school, in a very small town to make sure that I had a unique voice and that I could be somebody who could find my own way without having to somehow feel different.
And it's a lesson she taught me, it's not a lesson I understood at the time, but it's a lesson that I certainly understood in later years. And so Mrs. Carlyle, third grade, Salem, Utah would be a person that I would absolutely reach out to and say thanks for everything you did back then.
I've never advertised. And I don't know that I want to, because I don't want districts coming to this, schools coming to this, your states coming to this that aren't saying, "Yeah, this is important and we recognize the need." I don't want to convince anybody that this is what they need to do. And so far we haven't had to.
We've gotten into the point where a principal can manage everything about their community-based accountability system for their school in 20 sheets of paper, that's it, and big fonts. And we can fit all the major frameworks that people need to know, we can fit those on two sheets of paper. And if you can't get it down to that point, it's going to fail.
I think about some of these accountability systems that the states do. And you've got a book that thick that produces a grade, as opposed to having what we do, which is to give people a lens into what's happening at the right level that's meaningful, it's the right audience, it's forward facing. I mean, we figured out how to undo all of that and do it in a moment so that it can be meaningful to someone who has never been in an educational setting, knows nothing about education and who themselves had a horrible experience in education.
We finally have the ability to put the entire system in front of somebody and it fits on a very small table. And that was my goal right from the start, not to have something that would be cumbersome and was a program event. It's just this is just a set of frameworks. That's all this is.
David Reynolds: I learned a lot just standing here for 45 minutes. This was great.
John Tanner: No, you all are great. What PAGE has done is stunning. And I bragged about you guys to so many different people. This work would not be happening without you guys in Georgia. So it's very much appreciated.
David Reynolds: Thank you very much for your time, have a great day. Thanks for listening today. Find the lead, learn and change podcast on your search engine, iTunes or other listening app. Leave a rating, write a review, subscribe and share with others. In the meantime, go lead, go learn, go make a change, go.