Like most people, I have opinions about how to improve our public schools. Unlike many, because I have friends who are professional educators and know a lot more about it than I do, I have been reluctant to voice those opinions. However, since the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, I have become emboldened. Evidently it is now acceptable for someone with no education credentials to have serious influence on our public schools.

Admittedly, I don’t have the single education credential that Betsy DeVos claims: I did not fund the program that took one of the worst school systems in the country and made it worse, reducing or eliminating accountability for the charter schools that she was pushing for. However, I do have some relevant experience: I have for years created accountability systems for sales and management; I have designed dozens of programs to train business people; I have developed a system for measuring the ROI of training (the training itself, not just the delivery systems); and I spent a lot of years being judged by adults who sat in and paid for my seminars.

Still, I am not a professional educator, and I imagine most of them will disagree with what I’m about to say.

First, the big issue: teacher accountability. It’s always been strange to me that teachers in schools with large resources are being compared to teachers in schools with scant resources. One of the tenets of sales accountability is that we have to reduce the number of variables if we want to measure the output of the employee. In most cases, we simply indexed them. Sales people were ranked according to how well they met the company’s sales objectives. This eliminated conversations like the following:

Salesperson: I know I didn’t make my budget. I can’t do that when our prices are too high, and our inventory is too low.

Manager: You’re ninth out of nine salespeople. They’re all dealing with the same market, the same prices, and the same inventory you are.

So, my first accountability point is that teachers be compared only to others in the same school, dealing with the same kinds of students, and—probably at least as important—with the same kinds of parents.

Next, I would change the measurement protocol. I don’t think (and some of my professional educator friends would agree with me) that standardized tests are the best way of measuring student progress. It’s a very narrow measurement, focusing on the retention and regurgitation of some material. Part of my disdain for standardized test is—and this may be surprising—is that I always do very well on them. I have an interesting, but essentially useless talent for taking standardized tests. The upside of that is that it gave me something to brag about; the downside was that all of the college departments wanted me until they found that I wasn’t as advertised.

The measurement protocol that I would suggest involves changing the definition of success in the teacher’s job. My definition of the teacher’s job would be that the teacher prepares the student for success in the next level. Up until the senior year that means the next grade. In the senior year, that means preparation for college or the work world.

This is measured not by the students’ grades or scores at the end of the year, but at the end of either one or two grades higher, the idea being that we eliminate differences in specific class cohorts by letting them be scatted among other teachers in the next grade. Whether the measurement for the fourth grade is at the end of the fifth grade or the sixth grade should be subject to study.  

This system reduces a large number of variables: concentration of good students in a single class, the positive bias for good test takers, the availability of resources, and the level of parent involvement. And for reasons that I probably don’t know, it may be totally unworkable.

My next suggestion has to do with conforming public education to the world we live in. Last year, a Georgia legislator complained that students probably weren’t remembering facts; they were probably Googling them. It seemed that he thought that it was important for the student to memorize that the Norman Conquest happened in 1066, a fact they can pull off the web in seconds. I think it’s more important for the student to be able to clearly and concisely state the impact of the Norman Conquest on the world we live in today. Consequently, I would suggest that grades 1-8 be devoted to vocabulary and basic skills, (e.g., the parts of speech, how to write a paragraph, math problems, reading, etc.). High school courses would concentrate on having the students use those skills in critical thinking and problem solving.

(If a student manages to get out of junior high without any of the basic skills, say the ability to make subjects and verbs agree, I think there should be short remediation programs available online for the student. The teacher doesn’t stop to deal with what should have been dealt with last year or the year before.)

Which leads to my final and most controversial suggestion, especially for an English major: I think we should abandon the four-year requirement for literature and that all literature courses should be electives for those who enjoy that sort of thing. In their place I think there should be eight or maybe twelve credit hours—two-hour or three-hour classes for four years—in a course entitled “Culture,” which combines the politics, history, literature, music, art, and economics of specified periods in a single class. It is, for instance, easier to appreciate some of the plays of Shakespeare if you understand the class divisions and economics of Elizabethan England and that he had to entertain both the literate and illiterate at the same time. The Culture class would provide a broad (if superficial) study of everything that had an impact on the time.

(Again, full disclosure: I have always contended that my life was not measurably improved by memorizing broad swaths of Macbeth in the 10^th grade. That time might have been better spent trying to connect the dots on important things that happened in the 16^th or 17^th century, some of which may have included the production of Macbeth.)

Although any or all these ideas may well be ignored by people who know more than I do about these things, I figured if Betsy DeVos, who couldn’t even answer basic questions at her confirmation hearings, can be a power in education, I can try to be, too.

(For my article, All Training is not Basic Training, in which I explain why we shouldn’t spend all our time on basic skills, such as how to build a bomb, without moving to more critical-thinking skills, such as figuring out who should be bombed, send me an email.)