In a recent article in this forum I summarized the state of public education in Kansas. And it is not pretty: low student achievement, high per-pupil costs to Kansas taxpayers and the near entirety of students with no educational alternatives but the current failing zip code-based model.
This is not a new condition. Test scores – state assessments, NAEP and ACT – are not only unacceptably low, but have gotten worse over time. Increases in spending far outpace inflation. And while school choice options are mushrooming across a large portion of the country, Kansas has taken a feet-in-the-cement approach, allowing the status quo to flourish unchallenged, secure in its ineptitude. Perhaps the biggest indictment of the current system is that there is ample evidence that each year Kansas graduates thousands of seniors who lack basic skills in math and reading.
Why and how has K-12 education in this state gotten so abysmal?
Poor leadership is the answer. Perhaps lack of leadership is a better way to put it.
The time is now—and has been for a longtime–for the Kansas Board of Education to start focusing on students. Our students and the teachers (of which I was once one) laboring in our classrooms deserve better than the status quo. If the KSBOE isn’t ready to stand up, then maybe it’s time for the legislature to revisit our present constitutional arrangement.
Education Commissioner Randy Watson has held his position for over a decade now and what exactly has been done to help students do better in school? Nothing, really. Watson’s approach to the educating of Kansas students is based strictly process, not outcomes oriented. Call it a “The system is the solution” justification.
Watson was appointed commissioner at the same time assessing educational progress was converting from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to the current federal law – the Every Student Succeeds ACT (ESSA), signed into law during the dusk of the Obama administration. He seized upon that transition by lowering the expectations put on the schools for student performance.
On multiple occasions, Watson has proudly proclaimed that he ‘listened to the teachers’ (paraphrasing) who wanted less emphasis on testing. Of course they wanted less emphasis on testing because the results became a reflection on how teachers perform. I know that. I was in the classroom during the entirety of NCLB. Teachers wanted no part of the NCLB testing and the potential accountability that accompanied.
Watson simply wanted to make the teachers happy. And what better way to start than to dismiss state assessments as nothing more than minor inconveniences. One of those things you have to do, but without consequences. The intended consequences of NCLB itself never came to fruition so when even the appearance of accountability was removed with NCLB then bureaucrats had free reign to downplay, minimize, and outright ignore any testing rigor.
And what is the result of downplaying test results? The test scores are lower now than when the replacement test for NCLB was initially reported in 2015. Hmmm…
Watson demonstrated that he is more concerned with how teachers feel about testing than how the students perform. Now that’s a reformer.
His online bio describes Watson as “forward thinking” and as an “innovator”. It also describes him as “known for his visionary leadership to position Kansas as an innovator in rethinking a century-old school model.” Really, it says that. Watson couldn’t be more stuck in the 19th Century education model if he rode a penny-farthing to work every day.
His first major ‘innovation’ was the creation of the Kansans CAN vision with the hook that “Kansas leads the world in the success of each student.” Believe it or not, he can say that with a straight face.
Watson’s bio summarizes the pillars of Kansans CAN.
Among the forward-thinking initiatives are balancing the emphasis between academic test scores and the characteristics Kansans identified as ensuring student success. Dr. Watson was instrumental in introducing statewide outcomes for social-emotional growth, kindergarten readiness, individual plans of study, graduation attainment and postsecondary success.
Balancing? Watson’s concept of balancing is reminiscent of the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which a ‘balance’ is used to prove that a witch weighs the same as a duck. Both are preposterous.
His other ‘accomplishments’?
- A change in the way schools receive accreditation. The new acronym is KESA (Kansas Educational Systems Accreditation). KESA transformed school accreditation from the building level to the district level. The purpose of KESA is two-fold: (1) hide poor performing individual schools by accrediting the entire district, an (2) make sure every district gets accredited.
- The hokey Kansans CAN school redesign project that was a Watson vision that allowed schools to ‘innovate’ how they operate, analogous to the 1960s race to the moon. He picked seven schools to initiate the project and named them after one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. Truth is, the “innovations” were nothing the schools could not already have done without this sophomoric designation. This was nothing more than a way to promote Kansans CAN and provide a distraction from failing student outcomes.
- Watson’s latest, and current diversion in the face of the perpetually low state assessment scores, is to change the way state assessment results are defined. Initially, Watson wanted to do away with 10th graders taking the test, using logic unique to himself. Since that isn’t going to fly, his focus is now on the words to describe student performance. An excellent summary of this tactic is described by Dave Trabert here.
The commissioner likes to employ sports analogies to make or supplement his points. Well, in the world of sports what happens when a team annually suffers from poor performance? There is a change in those who coach or manage. Put succinctly, if Watson were a head coach or general manager of a sports franchise, he would have long been fired. But this is not about a sports team. This is much more important than that. It’s about the education of Kansas children.
How does Watson continue in that position? That’s on the members of the state board of education. If you don’t bother to watch state board meetings, and who could blame you, it is clear that the board is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the commissioner. And I thought the commissioner works for the board. How naïve of me.
Yes, the board has legal obligations that do not include student achievement. But whenever that issue is on the table, instead of taking action toward improving student outcomes they complain about those who criticize low achievement scores.
Some might consider this Einstein’s definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Not in this case, the state board does the same thing over and over while not caring if the results change. That’s not insanity, it’s indifference. The state board acts like feckless parents who allow their spoiled child to behave boorishly. Indifference is not acceptable.
Other states that have similar achievement woes have taken the initiative to expand school choice, enacted an A-F grading system, or other student-focused reforms. Unfortunately, Kansas is not among them.
Commissioner Watson is the symptom par excellence of system that favors adults over students. His (lack of) leadership should be taken seriously by a democratically-accountable KSBOE and legislature that must start demanding action on behalf of our students. Its very hard to see how our elected representatives can enact the changes needed as long as Randy Watson is education commissioner. Demanding achievement-based action from Commissioner Watson and KSDE as a whole, or finding someone who will, should be the first and only item on the KSBOE agenda.
