Education Week - June 8, 2016 - 26

COMMENTARY

Narrowing the Focus for
School Boards

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By Cathy Mincberg
chool boards have a difficult task.
They are expected to oversee a
vast number of details for their
districts: handle business operations, decide which e-tablets to
buy, keep constituents happy, and
spend hundreds of hours dealing with such mundane issues as
choosing between paper towels and hand dryers
for school restrooms. It's no wonder school boards
find it hard to focus on what really matters.
I spent 14 years serving on the Houston Independent School District's board of education. I
cared so much about improving educational outcomes for children and, yet, accomplished so little.
As the current president and CEO of the Center
for Reform of School Systems, a Houston-based
organization that provides training programs for
school board members and superintendents, I
work with individuals across the United States to
improve their ability to govern. Regardless of the
size, geographic location, and student demographics of the district, very few school boards believe
their districts are improving fast enough.
These feelings cause friction between boards and

superintendents, among the individual trustees,
and across communities. Because board members
typically are not education experts, their actions
often don't translate into gains in education. Many
board members blame the district's superintendent (who works for the school board) for the confusion and lack of progress. And, as most of us
know, this is a decades-old story.
More and more, school board members feel as
if they're running on hamster wheels. They must
jump from subject to subject and are expected to
either contribute an educated opinion or just trust
the administration's recommendations. School
boards get that they may make decisions without
fully understanding the issues; they spend huge
amounts of time talking about what they know
or can easily grasp, such as how long a student's
suspension should be. But the difficult discussions-how to reduce the dropout rate or implement meaningful professional development-get
short shrift.
Average board members devote 10 to 20 hours
each week to school district business, often without pay. Board meetings might cover 20 to 50 business and discussion items and can last between
two and eight hours, as members flit from topic to
topic. There is little time to develop a deep under-

Teachers Know Best
t seems as if no discussion of
America's educational climate is
complete without the mention of
Carol Dweck's concept of "growth
mindset" and Angela Duckworth's
notion of "grit." Along with the
fervor surrounding these buzzwords comes the inevitable calls
for some sort of quantifiable measurement
of these largely intangible characteristics.
And although both Dweck and Duckworth
largely disavow the notion of measuring
these intangible skills, their respective websites offer a visitor the opportunity to test
these soft skills. And in the past three years
alone, hundreds of academic articles have
been written about growth-mindset and grit
skills, including in Education Week.
Forgetting for a moment the larger debate about the validity or newness of some
of these "innovations," their measurement
specifically should be looked at with a critical eye. Growth mindset and grit are understandably difficult to measure using standardized methods and instead often rely on
Likert-style self-reporting. As some critics
have noted, such surveys can be muddy and
vulnerable to biases. The 2012 Program for
International Student Assessment results
place American schoolchildren 27th in math
and 20th in science but far above average in
confidence, suggesting that self-reporting as
a method is inherently problematic, particularly in the United States. In fact, many of
the psychological measures currently used

We already have the
most sophisticated and
accurate evaluative
tools at our disposal:
human beings and,
more specifically,
teachers."

26 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 8, 2016 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

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By Jessica Potts & Skip Potts

are unreliable and subject to reference bias,
confirmation bias, and social-desirability
bias. Therefore, if we do want to find viable
ways to evaluate grit or mindset, where do
we look for our solutions?
In this age of educational accountability,
the knee-jerk reaction is for policymakers
to measure these delicate values through
some type of box-checking scheme. Before
we discuss the potential of this particular
endeavor, it would be instructive to examine historical attempts to translate natural
human behaviors into mechanical, quantifiable systems. Consider the famous walking robots of Boston Dynamics. Boston
Dynamics, an MIT-spawned company that
focuses on robotics and human-simulation
software, attempted to create a robot that
could effectively mimic the human gait.
This company, which employed the brightest minds of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, was funded by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or
DARPA, and later bought by Google. It had
all the money, intelligence, and support it
could possibly need, and it still took more
than a decade to get its first real success
with the BigDog robot in 2005.
But it has been considerably more difficult for Boston Dynamics and equivalent
companies to create robots and software
that can mimic basic cognitive and interpersonal tasks, such as reading emotional
expressions or responding appropriately to
conversational stimuli. These simple mental functions, which most humans perform
effortlessly countless times a day, require

the harmonious firing of millions of neurons in the brain in combinations that scientists have yet to crack.
Consider for a moment that arguably the
smartest, richest, and best-educated people
in the world have spent billions of dollars
over more than half a century to get machines to do such basic tasks as walking or
responding appropriately to a person in a
conversation. Keeping that in mind, now
think about the fact that we are asking
policymakers to quickly and efficiently (not
to mention cheaply) come up with a simple,
quantifiable test for the complex, abstract
human qualities of grit and mindset. Regardless of the talent or experience of our
educational experts, the implications here
should be clear.
Thankfully, we already have the most sophisticated and accurate evaluative tools at
our disposal: human beings and, more specifically, teachers. Experienced, well-trained
teachers already possess the ability to differentiate grit from simple compliance, or
identify students who need to be supported
as they move toward growth mindsets.
While it is true that teachers can be influenced by reference bias and other factors, we should not favor imprecise rubrics
or dubious self-reporting over the power of
professional judgment. Simply put, human
beings are capable of amazing feats. Most
of us can walk, register the emotions of
others, and easily have a conversation. We
often do so simultaneously. These feats are
entirely unmatched in the history of inventions, and to assume policymakers will

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Education Week - June 8, 2016

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