The Death of Standardized Testing
A Principal's Fight for Educational Evolution
Institutions age, just like people do. Young Google lived by the slogan “don’t be evil.” They grew up since then. Institutions have diseases, too. Things can heat up as micro-cultures collide. Corporate antibodies are administered; stasis re-established.
The nation’s largest school district is one such institution. Education remains one of the very few sectors of our economy which has not evolved for 150 years. Prisons are the other. Even factories have outgrown the traditional factory model still in use in our schools.
Those participating in such a massive organisms aren’t knowingly fighting for status quo. They are good people. They are educators. But their job is to operate systems designed to maintain standards. High standards, if you will, still standardize. And standardized thought is the core symptom of our illness.
With my large key ring and walkie talkie, I am a “school building leader.” An apt name given the speed at which buildings move. My employer’s stated mission, is to “improve student outcomes…,” defined as “rising scores on state tests.” Standardized tests measure thinking that fits into a menu of options or text response boxes. This is the type of thought that computers had mastered even before the emergence of artificial intelligence.
Industrial education measures success based on which students can act like a 1980’s-era PC. How is that useful data? Before computers, we needed people to serve as robots in factories. Now those jobs are gone.
Even families that favor clear metrics so that their children can be trained as top performers can’t be happy about the predictive ability of standardized testing relative to success in our global, digital economy.
As this factory learning drifts farther and farther away from students’ day-to-day experience, more of them naturally disengage. As a result, our schools can’t even increase standards-based learning. We are failing to brainwash our children to be robots. A double negative and a pathetic silver lining.
Even if low income public schools prepared graduates for college and a secure salaried job in a cubicle, a reach goal no doubt, these jobs are quickly departing from office parks. AI-informed widgets are taking their place. I can’t say I’ll miss the human Tupperware that is the modern-day cubicle. Another pathetic silver lining when compared to the harm caused by our public schools.
Standardized schooling demands compliance as a prerequisite to learning. Charter schools, the cutting edge among industrial programming, line children up single file, in uniforms, hands by sides to march in unison.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that future app-based work will be better than the industrial office park version. Are Uber drivers better off than were taxi drivers? The simple fact is that industrial life has been disrupted by digital technology and our schools are simply not preparing graduates to live in this new context, let alone fight for their rights from the digital grass roots.
In 2003, I transitioned from a career as a software engineer to teaching physics and robotics in high poverty schools. I believed that bringing hands-on learning to low income schools could help manage this transition away from industrial education. I had grown up in the Waldorf schools as well as Chicago Public Schools and I knew that we already had the answers to quality education, they just weren’t implemented in low income communities.
After producing breakthrough student outcomes as a teacher, I was promoted to leading my own building. Within 18 months we had turned a failing school into a top-performing school across accountability metrics. In each case, I had leveraged the power of student voice, and the meta-cognitive influence of using cameras and microphones. Audio/video are digital-era literacy and they come with a powerful window/mirror to see within ourselves and out to society. The meta-cognitive reflection of podcasting or film editing was my secret weapon to address student mindset, making implicit student thinking explicit.
On February 27, 2017 I arrived to work before 6AM and I was looking forward to a busy day. It was still dark outside, but the building was already in motion. We had been having issues with the boiler, an explosive tank of fuel in the basement that had been spewing smoke and setting off countless fire alarms, disrupting classes and making me nervous.
Students had just returned from mid-winter recess and my office manager, who did so much more than manage the office, was out. It was also Black History Month and our event calendar was packed. We had screened the film “I Am Not Your Negro” about James Baldwin before the theatrical release. Our building was where Mr. Baldwin had gone to elementary school and so Raoul Peck had come to show the film with us first. The event was attended by the Associated Press and a range of city officials and famous Harlem personalities, seated among our students. We were also in the thick of admissions interviews for the spring trimester and I was preparing to run my weekend podcast production experience with a new group of incoming students.
My desk phone rang. It was the school aide who was covering the main office. My superintendent and his deputy were in the building. I notified my arrival team that I would be briefly off radio, in my office.
I invited the two men in, trying not to act impatient. They closed my office door after coming in. Both chose to remain standing. I did the same, glad that things might move along quickly.
“Pack your stuff, Principal Z.”
I froze.
“Get a box. Take what you need.”
“Excuse me?” I finally managed to reply.
“You should expect that you will not be returning. Ever.”
I was all-of-a-sudden all jitters and adrenaline as if under physical attack. This is what my students experience during adverse childhood experiences, is what first went through my mind as my body was frozen. My veins throbbed. I’m an adult, I told myself. Stop shivering so much. Breathe.
My knees were weak as I searched for a box behind an overgrown vine. I became angry and sad and so confused in my own thoughts and wonderings.
The superintendent sat down, turning one of the conference table chairs toward me. He put his hands on his knees and slowly lowered down toward the chair edge. “Days like this are my least favorite days,” he said, looking down at his hands.
I looked over at him, shaken loose from my inner turmoil. I looked at his face for the first time since he had told me to pack up. Over the past seven years we had served together on various initiatives as fellow principals before he had been promoted. We shared passion for this work. I had been proud to make him proud, whenever I could. This couldn’t be easy for him.
“I know that this is not what is best for the students,” he continued. His hands each remained flat on top of the corresponding bent knee, fingers lined up straight. He was leaning a bit too far forward in the chair, as if he were about to stand back up.
“I know how how much you do for them…” he threw in.
I was making progress filling my box with a few personal items. I wouldn’t even have time to keep files from my laptop. Oh well.
“mm, hmm” his deputy chimed in quietly, nodding while looking at something off to one side, as if he were lost in his own thoughts.
“I know.” I said. I appreciated the bit of warmth but felt a bit awkward comforting them at this moment. A district superintendent is hired, fired, and paid by the State. In NYC, the City somehow has such control over him that his opinion is ignored. State oversight captured by city politics.
I unhooked the radio from my belt. The deputy took it from me as he informed me that he would be staying to serve the community in my absence.
“Until a replacement is found,” he added, rather hastily. Substitute teachers don’t tend to take great care of students; a substitute principal is no different.
He took my keys. He didn’t feel the need to go over the day’s activities. The Assistant Principal would soon arrive. I left him the school-wide calendar for reference. The sky was suddenly a clear, bright baby blue out my office window that faced 128th street. I wanted to take my house plants and so many small trinkets made for me by students over the past seven years. The box was full.
“Don’t worry, they will be ok.” The deputy said, tipping his head toward the door to indicate that he was referring to my students and staff. We both knew the next few months would be riddled with chaos for them. Just like their experience at hospitals, with the court system, tax authorities, city agencies, police, lawyers, employers, landlords, store clerks. This place of shelter was at it’s end. Back to status quo.
I held back tears that came as soon as I made eye contact with the deputy for the first time. I tried to settle my shivering stomach and hands lest the shivers spread to my lips which I was pressing together, just to stay on the safe side.
The two escorted me from the building, box in hand. They gave me an address where I was to report, immediately. Soon after, I was taken off payroll and barred from stepping foot in any school building. My life was sent into a tailspin. Corporate antibodies were being administered.
By maxing out credit cards, borrowing money from family, refinancing our home, then putting our home on the market while we moved out belongings into a storage unit, we survived without a paycheck for the remainder of the calendar year. The bond between my wife and I, as well as that with the kids, was growing stronger. She had always been my right hand, and the community support and family outpouring bolstered our convictions. Her own father had experienced something similar back in Japan when she was growing up.
We had recently become foster parents, too, and interacting with family court reminded us of our great privilege in this world. We felt a duty to stay strong. We were mutating together. Having so much time together was exactly what we needed to allow our mutation to progress.
Over the course of this mutation, our mission became clear: alter the source of accountability data. If we could shift the incentives away from standardized testing and toward project-based learning, we could help the system evolve just as we had done in my classroom and at the school for fifteen consecutive years. We spent late nights after the kids were asleep discussing how to offer that same experience to more students in low income schools using economic incentives.
Corporate antibodies are lawyers or lawyer-types like compliance investigators or union officials. Just like my superintendent, all these lawyers were apologetic as they went through the motions, knowing all too well I was just a small microorganism within a much larger organization. All except one. One lawyer saw me as a clear and present danger. He was seeing something that I had not yet acknowledged for myself.
A commitment to student-centered and teacher-centered learning was about to spread beyond one building and even beyond one city. We discovered our role as a microorganism within a larger body that needed us to survive, even as it attacked us.
Because my staff had my back, and after my superintendent refused to lie under oath, I was able to re-enter, professionally unscathed. A rare victory of a microorganism.
I was back on payroll. Huge exhale. Financial hemorrhaging sutured. But the re-entry was not to be a smooth one. The organism continued to confuse me for the enemy. Even after a thorough legal process so clearly determined otherwise.
I was given a job processing medical leave applications. The department director was reprimanded by the Chancellor’s cabinet for bragging about the work I had done for her. I next worked for the General Counsel, even while that office was in multiple lawsuits against me. I made the team proud and I learned a lot about Special Education law in the process.
Despite my efforts to demonstrate my commitment to the organization, warts and all, the department remained hell bent on pushing me out. They refused to implement the arbitrator’s ruling. They ignored it. They were no longer willing to play by their own rules. Institutional RASH. I filed suit to compel them to abide by the regulations. They drowned me in expensive legal misdirection. Paper trails of PUSS.
My paychecks were routinely misplaced until mortgage payments were overdue. A year’s worth of my vacation was erased and never returned. My health insurance mistakenly cut off three times, “accidentally.” Friends and colleagues encouraged the NY Times to look into my situation.
I remember standing outside of the Courthouse in downtown Manhattan, being yelled at by that city lawyer. We stood on Worth Street at Baxter, trees swaying in the windy fall evening, clouds rolling in with the dusk. He was screaming and jabbing his finger at me. If I ever used any social media, even privately, he warned, I would risk legal consequences.
While I was legally gagged, they spread rumors about me which were printed in a popular news daily on four separate occasions. They lied to my students and their parents about me. They pressured my former staff to declare that I had acted inappropriately. They demoted alleged loyalists, chasing a number of top educators out of the NYC school system. On one occasion they removed a staff member from service, threatened termination, only to withdraw all charges the morning that termination proceedings were to commence.
June 4, 2018 New York Times Cover
The New York Times did spend many months and countless recorded interviews to sort out the facts of the situation. On June 4, 2018, my name appeared on the front page, nationally, above the fold, five times with a giant portrait on a subsequent page. I was mutating beyond who I had known myself to be.
The investigative article wrote of my situation alongside giants in the New York City School System like Santiago Taveras. I would have never dreamed of comparing myself to someone like Santi who I held in such high regard and who had done so much more than I throughout his career. I barely recognized myself as they described me in that cover story.
Having been a software engineer, I read as much as I could about what had happened in software since my departure from the field fifteen years earlier. Everything I read was processed through the lens of my recent experience and current predicament. By December, 2018, I had written a book about how decentralized record keeping was transforming our world and how it could transform education.
Through my time as a teacher and principal I had come to see that the high school transcript is a perfect attack vector to reorganize incentives toward student-centered learning. All K-12 instruction builds toward this singular dataset: the secondary school transcript.
On the app, students earn crypto and educators earn nonprofit USD to maintain the reputation of individual, open source credits.
Fast forward to August 2021. We are now a collective of twenty professionals focused on a decentralized, nonprofit app, hs.credit. The measure of student learning is a non-transferable NFT. Student media is merged with economics to produce gold standard units of academic capital.
Just like Uber has no cars but is the largest taxi service or Airbnb no hotels but is the largest provider of leisure accommodations, hs.credit has no schools but will become the largest school district in the nation based on student transcripts represented.
hs.credit contributors have day jobs. On our nights and weekends we forward this app that has no headquarters, nor CEO. We earn future royalties by completing work for the platform.
Profit Model
At scale, we become a data company. The data will show where gold standard 11th and 12th grade credits are being earned as well as how often. The data could be viewed on a map for parents or as database tables through an API for large districts or Federal agencies. School districts and universities or Federal agencies pay an annual data subscription charge. That funding is passed directly to educators to evaluate incoming student work products, in the form of 10-minute video or audio segments.
Anti-Biased Architecture
Students are incentivized to ensure the stream of approved youth media is as diverse as their district as a whole. Cities that only produce content in homogeneous upper-class zip codes will fail to mint academic capital and their students will not earn any crypto. I have doubts that the adults will ever do the work necessary to ensure every school has access to necessary resources. Students, historically, have been successful as advocates and change agents. By sharing resources in a peer-to-peer academic network, students earn crypto while interacting with people their age who live in very different socioeconomic circumstances.
Market Fit
Look at families who are “opting-out” of elementary exams. These are our early adopters who we hope to inspire to do the same in high school. Until hs.credit, there was no way to opt-out of standardized testing in high school.
