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Why is Accountability Controversial? The Future of Assessment in a Choice World
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This session was recorded live at the
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2026 asu gsv summit in san diego. My name is Michael Horn and we're going to have a really fun conversation today about why is accountability controversial, the future of assessment in a choice world. And I'm going to introduce our panelists in one moment. But the basic idea of this panel is I'm going to let each person sort of give lightning round, if you will, of answers up front and then we're going to mix it up into a bigger conversation where ideally I'm going to fade into the background and we're going to let all these distinguished folks hash it out, if you will. And so we are missing one member who was here for a second. He'll be right back. But I'm going to introduce the ghost of John Danner, CEO of Flourish Schools, a low cost private school network. And before that, the co founder, founder of Rocketship Public Education. Then we have the former governor of New Mexico, Susana Martinez. With us today, we have Victoria Pilvenen. She is the senior vice president, Learning solutions and strategy at Learning Mate. And then we have the secretary of education from Sao Paulo, Renato Feder. And then most immediately to my left, Don Soifer, the CEO of the National Micro Schooling Center. So we're going to get into it. I'm going to start with the policy makers here first. It's called privilege. And I'm going to start with the governor first. You were governor of New Mexico, of course, for two terms. And I'm going to 2011-2019. And you focused a lot as governor on accountability, implementing an A through F grading system. John, go on up there. Come on, man.
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And
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introducing teacher evaluations and the like. I'm curious how you thought at that time specifically about the importance of assessments when you were governor and how you thought about how narrow or broad to assess. Are we just focusing on math and English? Are we thinking about more than that, less than that? And the role of assessments in all those reforms you put in place to
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C
give that my position in context. New Mexico ranked 50th in the nation in education for decades, four decades, a very long time. It seems to be a policy issue that is talked about often in campaigns, but not a whole lot is done. Removes us from 50th in education. Assessments were being done, data might have been taken. How was it being used to improve gross in education? How do we make sure we're informing parents how your kids are doing, how your classroom's doing, how your school is doing, how the Leadership is doing all of that became extremely important to me because we couldn't continue to be satisfied with being 50th in the nation in education for so long without any real change. And so it was important to me that we do assessments. One other thing is that's not a pro or con at all. I worked well with the unions. We are a union state. And I wanted to very much work closely with the teachers and get their input. Because I never thought anything was fair about a fourth grade teacher getting a student or many students in New Mexico that were reading at the second grade level. Completely unfair to that teacher. How did I get the input of where did we lose that child? Was extremely important. So the assessments became something about. It included reading and math, but it also included growth. How much did you grow? How could our exemplary teachers, especially identifying that was extremely important. And could they teach maybe a year and a half worth of class in a one year period? Because there were exemplary teachers really good. And we could send some of our struggling kids in that school in that building. And so I did put in. We passed a law where we were grading schools A through F. It was a way to give information to teachers that when the school year began and those kids, and you had data on those children, not last year's kids, it just left and went. The data goes someplace like naep the totals and where you are, don't follow that kid. They got a whole new set of kids in that classroom. And so I wanted to be able to measure that growth in order to assess. Where are we with you and what needs do you have? Where do we put in our dollars? That is, whether it's any kind of tutoring, is there a ton of absenteeism? Do our kids cutting classes, why are they cutting classes? Are they cutting school altogether? Why is that happening? How do we change that and improve that? Because you don't have butts in the seats, you don't have education happening. And so assessment to me was extremely important to figure out what has been happening for four decades that we can't continue to be okay with. And so we implemented no social promotion. We didn't pass it as a law, but we wanted to identify the children who were continuously going on to the next grade and the next grade and could not do math or reading at grade level. And therefore eventually as a prosecutor, I was a prosecutor for 25 years. I ended up with those kiddos as a prosecutor in the juvenile justice system who couldn't read anything that was happening. Any documents that were given to them by their lawyers. And I caught on very quickly and said, something's happening here. Who's leaving these kids behind? And they stopped going to school around
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the seventh or eighth grade.
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And then nobody cared. And so how were we able to kind of move those systems in a better way? And we did. We finally were able to get the data. Data's important if the one that holds that data is actually using it per child, per classroom, and using the kind of the dollars that we were putting in each school and taking advantage of those dollars.
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B
All right, let me bring Secretary Federer in here. You've moved. So it's an interesting set of connections, actually, to what we just heard. You've moved in the last couple years to what I would call a high standardization, high support, high accountability model. I'll let you describe it in a moment, but you're essentially telling teachers what and how to teach. You're giving them professional development and resources to do it, and then you're testing students to make sure that it's actually been effective and understanding that, and then rewarding teachers accordingly. Why was this the right model for you all in Sao Paulo, in Brazil
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right now, I'll gain some time because we had the same situation. Zero accountability, strong unions, and a lot of freedom. And when we spoke, I kind of took the freedom out. And that's a real sensitive topic. But I see that we are doing the correct thing because we give a lot of support. So class by class and homework by homework, and we track which kids. We are ultra trackers. Ultra trackers. We track each kid if it's doing homework or not, if it's getting it right or not. We track the kids sometimes four times a year on how they are performing. Today is Prova Paulista. So it's the same test for all kids in grade level, history, geography, math. And we track it. And the results are amazing. We are growing. We grew last year more than any other year in Sao Paulo history. So some people here could advocate, let's give freedom to the schools. I in Sao Paulo have the opposite view. Our schools doesn't need more freedom. They need more support and light on results.
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All right, so that we're starting to lay out our framework here. John, I'm going to bring you in because you co founded Rocketship Public Schools. So I'm going to bring you back a little bit. And you did enormously well on the accountability game that we have just been hearing about in effect. Right. I think it's fair to say you all founded a charter to perhaps avoid some of the standardization we just heard about, but you were acing the accountability assessment game, in effect. And I'm just sort of curious, does that make you pro standardized assessments, this accountability model, or since you've founded Flourish, this network of low cost private schools? Has there been a shift in your thinking in this environment that's pretty radically changed, right to now where roughly 20 states have extreme forms of educational choice?
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I guess I would say three things. So Rocket Ship was elementary schools. And I think there's no argument with what both the governor and the minister said. Like if you can't read, write and do math, like you're just locked out of society. So you have to do well at that. And I'm actually totally fine with measuring that. I think where we went wrong, we started Rocket Ship right after no Child Left behind is when you measure that in elementary, I think there's almost no disagreement. As you move the standards up, you get into what I would say is more and more arbitrary things to kind of hold kids accountable for, which if that's all you were doing, that would be fine. But what that did was to push out a lot of the other things that are great about school. So that's point one, I think elementary, no question. As you move up, I'm a lot more dubious about whether standards cause excellence. Two, we're in a completely different age now from when I started Rocketship. When I started Rocket Ship, it was a college for all world. That was the clear path to success. I don't think that's clear at all anymore. I think that the alternative paths to success in life and happiness are really just as likely to be true for kids. Third thing is we're in the AI age and kind of like it or not, I know a lot of people in education don't like that. I'm from Silicon Valley, so I'm fine with it. But in the AI age, it seems to me that human skills are going to be much, much more important. Important than content knowledge. The idea that a kid in high school chemistry, they're going to ace high school chemistry and that's going to give them some huge advantage in life versus they're better at working with people just doesn't make any sense to me. And so the standards movement drives this kind of very content focused learning. And I think it really deprives teachers the time to focus on human skills. And I think we have that opportunity now.
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All right, Victoria, let me bring you in because you think a lot about some of the elements that John just talked about and I think a big question people might have is, okay, great, how do we put in practice developing agency, for example, and some of these super skills that John alluded to, and is there a way to do that with an objective third party lens or is that not the way to think about this?
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So I come to this conversation as a former school teacher, school leader. I then transitioned into the startup world, had an opportunity to work with a homeschool company that then wanted to branch out into B2B, working directly with schools and districts. And now I am in this sort of like service consultancy space. And I see so many different organizations and how they want to do school. And we get the opportunity to think through these different models because we have to think about the accountability lens, the assessment lens, you know, all these layers. And then of course, you know, going from the college for all to the maybe the skills for all or however you want to define it. And so, you know, we're constantly grappling with our customers, our clients about, you know, where do they want to be and what do they want to do. But it's all about starting with the learner outcomes of, you know, what do you want this profile to look like, and then taking every single layer and figuring out what the model looks like for them and then iterating on it when it works and when it doesn't. And so that's sort of how we think about it as far as an agency lens. That's a big part of what schools are thinking about in terms of how can we bring those executive functioning skills and other skills like communication to our learners. And some of that does overlap with content. So we've seen models with math and SEL work really well because we can talk about pieces and fractions and sharing. So there's different ways to do it. And ultimately I think it boils down to how can our school leaders and policymakers all work together and who's going to be brave enough to do something different?
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All right, let me bring Don in then, because you have this bird's eye view across the landscape, right? You run the National Micro Schooling Center. You were also early on, the same charter game that John was playing in the DC board, for example. And I just, I guess I'd love to get your take around this question. Is it as simple as letting parents decide? And as we get into this, we'll maybe say, middle school space. I'm hearing a little bit of a point of departure here. Or do you think there's a role for assessment and outcomes sort of rooted in where we had been.
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Well, thanks. The National Microschooling center is the nation's leading nonprofit, movement builder and resource hub. We've probably trained more people to launch and prepare to succeed with micro schools around the country than any other organization. Micro schools are entirely different than our broader schools of choice experience in this country in so many ways. Micro schools are not bound by the limited and clunky metrics of our state school performance frameworks. And that's an opportunity micro school founders and your research has shown that people choose, families choose their microschool for any number of different reasons. So microschool founders prioritize things like non academic growth or academic growth in ways that matter most to their stakeholders. And that's critical. So to answer your question, in those states where micro schools have the opportunity to utilize taxpayer dollars, it's reasonable and understandable that we need to demonstrate our impact in ways that show that we are being good stewards of the taxpayer dollars. In most states, microschools don't see a dime of taxpayer dollars. What are the ways that we can really do this in align with the very unique missions and models and reasons that stakeholders choose microschools?
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All right, so let's start to mix this up a little bit and hopefully I'm going to fade a little bit into the background as you. I think we've heard the basic perspectives, which is why we each went through that. I want to put out a framework for you all that Patricia Levesque at Excelined introduced a year or two ago, in which she basically argued that traditional public school districts ought to have a lot more regulation, assessment, accountability requirements, charters as sort of these hybrid actors sit somewhere in between. And then on the other side, the micro school, et cetera space. I prefer John's formulation of low cost private schools for the record. But this whole continuum, if you will, should have a lot more freedom. So there's sort of this continuum as you move into parent choice and accountability being imposed from the bottoms up versus top down. And maybe Secretary Federer, you can sort of start us off here because Brazil has limited publicly funded educational choice. So the question, I'm curious is would your view on the importance of standardization, assessment support and so forth, would that change if the context were different and there was a lot more publicly funded choice or no, that that that would miss something in your framework. And then by the way, just to be clear, everyone just jump in.
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All right,
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so in our state and most states of Brazil, there is no pro choice. There is public and private and no public Money goes into charters or vouchers. The only exception that I know is Parana, the state I was and I implemented charter schools there. So I'm very in favor of charter schools in general, but in other states, it's not possible. So if you have a big chain of schools, let's say 500 schools, 1,000 schools in Sao Paulo, 5,000 schools, what you described, zero chance of implementation, even for high school. So if we were going for micro schools, if we were going to charter schools or vouchers, we can focus on skills and 21 century skills. But for a public maker like me in Brazil, this is a disaster if I try to go there. So I need to go to contents, you know, like how much chemistry the chemistry teacher is teaching. And that's a success because the point is we give classes. So our main product are classes. And the class in public schools cannot be a mess. They need to be organized. And if. When you try. So that's my main point. You know, when you try. Okay, let's. So how the kid feels. So is he learning how to bond or empathy? The class is a mess. You have no choice.
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Can I ask you a question?
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Sure.
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What if you could measure those human skills?
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If you could.
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Yes.
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100% in favor.
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So welcome to the AI Age. We do.
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Yeah.
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So we transcribe our classrooms. The AI can rate students on each skill. It's 92% correlated with what our lead teacher would rate those students independently now. So we're entering a world where, because of AI and its ability to deal with a huge amount of unstructured information and make judgments based on it, we've moved from unmeasurable to measurable with human skills. And I think it's a huge opportunity to change the system.
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You measure per class or per month
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or per year per student every day.
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And this happens already in elementary. We call them observable skills. They may not be titled the ones that we've mentioned up here, but we're already doing it. And we have to expand that and we have to continue to do it through the learning progression.
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Would you put it in a public policy framework? I'm curious. And maybe Victoria and John, you start, and then I want to hear Don and Governor Martinez on this as well. Yeah, go ahead.
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I would use it right away. I want to see that.
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I'll have you. We're in Phoenix.
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E
I haven't seen. I believe at some point it will be ready for use, but I haven't seen anything. We have been trying. I have been opening bids in government. Bids and all the suppliers, IT suppliers are bad. We don't have. When we try it, even before the
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bid, we'll help you for free.
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All right, there you go. Deals being done at this summit. Go ahead, Victoria.
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Policy wise, I mean, you're probably better to speak on this than I am, Susanna, but I think frameworks are super important. Case studies are always important. People need to see what it looks like in implementation. That's why this is so an important connection, it sounds like, and maybe for some of you too. And so I think we have to start somewhere and we have to show that it's possible and then help. Help provide the infrastructure for help provide the implementation because we're only as good as we give that support.
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What do you do with the data, the human measuring that? I mean, okay, this person is not empathetic. This person is a troublemaker. This kiddo is whatever.
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It's the best possible question. Now that these things are measurable and you have years of SEL research that was not quantitative, what do you do with it? The way we think of it is hypotheses. There's tons of research on all 24 of our superpowers, how you might improve them. But all those studies are survey based and things like that. Whereas once you can measure it, you can say, okay, we tried this really hard for three months. That didn't really work, so we're going to try something else. It's the beginning of actually formalizing the education on human skills and giving that
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agency to the learners to know, where should they be, where can they be and how can they get there? Because we can measure meas. Measure, measure, measure. But we want agency. At the end of the day, we want really great citizens to join us as we age and they start to take over our jobs.
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Yep.
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A
Those of you who know me know that I have exactly two gifts, and one of them is to make anything more complicated than it needs to be. And that's what I'm about to do here. So first of all, in micro schools, we celebrate low baseline scores. That tells us we're serving the kids that we're looking to serve and that you would call an enrollment preference. So the longitudinal growth of individual kids over time is a premium when it comes to showing what our impact is, what our impacts are. What do micro school founders say? Micro school founders say our families came to us because they don't like standardized testing. It's microschooling. Today's microschooling movement is not about dispensing privilege. It's about reasonable families that just are not sure that their kid is being best prepared for the future that their kid is going to have. How can we demonstrate the impact of micro schools to our most important stakeholders? These are challenges. The last point that I'll make is that the beautiful diversity of the microschooling movement really comes from the different models in the ESA stage. We where we have true unbundling as Milton Friedman has intended for micro schools and for all school choice. We have microschools that don't meet four days a week or three days a week or two days a week and their families. More families come to microschools from traditional district operated schools than anywhere else. By and large, these are not traditional homeschoolers. But how can we measure their impact in ways that are effective and matter so that their families understand that their child is being well prepared for the future that they're going to have? And maybe those families don't buy into their state's academic content standards. Maybe they don't much care for algebra 2. And micro schools are developing a real ingenious approach to showing their impact in ways that matter to their families.
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B
So were you going to jump in or go ahead.
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D
I just want to make another point about homeschool families is that they also are really protective of what data that you are capturing or how you use it. And so, you know, for folks that are operating, you know, at the country level, state level, you know, all these different levels here in the room, like we have to, I think we have to figure out school options and like provide the nutrition label of sorts of like what does your option provide and what does your option provide? Because you know in your option and your option. Because parents are making a choice when they are able to make a choice and they're moving their child where they feel they're going to be most supported, most successful. And so you know, we have an opportunity to guide them and support them and make sure that they feel like they have the options. But then they also have the governance and the security behind the options.
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B
And it seems to me that there's at least two confounding things there worth like throwing into the mix. So I'd love to hear and then Secretary, you can jump in which is one what Don just mentioned, which is that a lot of this is getting unbundled increasingly. And so the view of we assess to understand school quality when you may be taking two classes from this place and you may be sitting in the microschool for one day and then you're going to the online tutor and then you've got the piano teacher. And like, this is a very different landscape of measurement, it strikes me. And then the second one is this notion of the nutrition label, if you will, of for any given provider, I suppose relative to the quality that they would say they provide or the value that they provide, maybe, or why parents are choosing them. That doesn't fit neatly into, say, an A through F framework. Right. That's a much more complex schema now. And so I'm sort of curious to hear you all digest and think through what that would look like. Yeah, go ahead, Governor. And then Secretary, either way, I think
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C
one of the things is, as a policymaker and spending taxpayer dollars and being 50th for so long, I had to make some decisions on where that money was going to go and how it was going to be spent. I had to focus. Our kids were not reading. I'll just tell you a very quick story. And what just shocked me that there was no shame in it. There was a president of a university in my state and I was governor for just a few months and I had him come in and I wanted to talk about our graduation rates. When I went to college, I went four years right out of high school. Four years, measured it out, wanted out, needed to get onto the workforce because I just needed to earn money and I was going to go on to law school, just needed to move. And so I asked this president, what is the graduation rate in your university? And he said, and it was in the high 20 percentile. Percentage. Percentage. Not percentage, like 26%. And I went, what? And he said, oh, but that's six years, like that was a good thing. And I said, when did it go to six years? And he said, oh, we all measured that way. And I said, do you tell parents 4 year, 5 year, 6 year, how many graduate? No. And I said, okay, tell me how many graduate in the four years? It was in the low teens. And there was no shame in the response. And much of that was kids who were graduating from high school were going into college because that was the. Everyone goes to college and they go into college and when they go into college, they cannot do reading, they cannot do the math. So they have remedial courses for two years and they are spending all this money, whether it's government money or their own money, and they drop out. They got to get into the workforce. They cannot continue to do remedial studies and not going towards a degree of some sort of. And so they just drop out have all this debt and off they go. That happened at K through 12. And so what happens? The college keeps pointing the finger at the teachers, the teachers keep pointing at the college that they're not preparing the teachers well enough. And back and forth. I needed to focus on the reading and math of kiddos in charter schools because we did assess charter schools. We made sure that that was part of it. And we closed a few charter schools that were not doing very well.
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A
Amazing.
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C
But what I did note was many of our kids in poverty who could not get transportation to alternative schools. The parent may want it, but they're working two jobs, single mom, blah, blah. There's no way that that kiddo could be moved to a school that the parent preferred because the school bus systems were not getting those kids to different places. And so the focus, when you have what you had in Brazil and I had in New Mexico, has to be so narrowed that it's a luxury to have what you had, what you measure as well. And maybe focusing on the elementary is super important because by the time they get into the higher grades, when they have more freedom and more different ways of learning in the musical, all kinds of different ways of learning, the kid is ready for that. If they're not ready for that liberal teaching that. What are we doing? We're not properly serving that kiddo.
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E
Let me provoke a little bit further. I consider myself as the Secretary of Education and not the secretary of happiness. Okay. So it's an important point.
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B
That's going to be the mic drop moment. Go ahead.
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E
When you describe a school saying, oh, the kid feels so good. He's so attached to the school and so engaged, and he doesn't have frustration and he's so happy. He's happy in the short term, but I'm concerned with his long term. So my provocation is if you focus on how do you feel all the time to learn to put your brain into like a next level, it hurts. You're not going to be engaged all the time. So if you want to be happy all the time, you're not going too far. You know, you need to.
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F
Mr. Secretary.
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E
So that's my point.
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F
What about agency and curiosity? Doesn't matter.
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E
It. It goes both ways. You need. It's not only with only agency and curiosity, in my opinion, you don't go too far. You need also.
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B
Well, John, let me ask the question this way to you, actually. Right? So agency and curiosity best developed in those content areas and sort of a wide berth of projects and things that you could be Doing that have academic origins? No. Yes. No. And what's the transferability?
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F
I'm very bad at answering questions, so I'll answer the question.
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B
Answer the question you wish I'd asked.
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F
I mean, if you take two different kids, let's say both of them get a great elementary education. They know how to read, write, do math at elementary level. Now you've got eight more years with that student, however long that is. Seven more years. One child does our current program, which is like they do biology and chemistry and trigonometry and all these things for eight years. And the other kid does a lot of that, but also works on their agency, their curiosity, their perseverance, their self awareness, their organization, et cetera. What would your prediction be for these two kids when they leave the system?
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E
There's not the situation. Let me reframe it. Okay. When you take part of a curriculum for curiosity and projects in paper, it's really nice. Of course I want. But if you go in large scale and in a cow's city or a state like mine, what you get is not what you want. You get like, you know, that project that I should do instead of really engaged, I will. What is the least amount of time and effort I can put so the kid won't learn as much?
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F
So I think that was true before you could measure these things.
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E
Could be.
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F
I think it's a big change once you can, because then as a systems leader, you can say, hey, we're doing all this stuff, but it's really not working. We need to figure out a better way to do that.
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D
And it's not all projects, you know, like there's variations to it. Like problem based learning is a big one right now. I mean, there's others too. So I think it's like we can have our cake and eat it too. I think like there's truth to all of this. And it's just like, where do you want to be on that spirit spectrum and where do you want to provide both to students? And I mentioned earlier, like college for all, skills for all. Give them both, you know, so it's like Green Street Academy in Baltimore City. That's what they do. Everybody can get a cna, they can get, you know, veterinary backgrounds, whatever. Like all the different options they have, but they're also rigorous and they're ensuring that if and when students want to be college boundaries, they have the option still. We're not taking anything away from them, we're adding to it. And I think that's the mentality here is like how can we add to it? And I know that can add stress and concern at scale and change for teachers and educators alike. But it's our job.
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A
How can you do it? We are wrapping up the data collection of a study that Professor Daniel Hamlin from Oklahoma is doing over the 2526 school year with 60 micro schools, about 1000 kids where microschools are opting in to measure their impact in terms of human capital, social capital and cultural capital in different ways. These are things that can be measured and depending who your most important stakeholders are. Everyone on our team that works with micro schools is a microschool founder. Our own micro school, we were a public private partnership with the city of North Las Vegas, the poorest, hardest working, fastest growing city in Nevada. I had to contractually promise in writing that our children would deliver 125% of the academic growth over time of the schools that our kids were coming from. And my hill to Diane was that we weren't going to have to sit and take a clunky state test, but that we worked with the RAND Corporation on a case study that you could do that through the embedded assessments and digital learning tools that were pertinent to those kids. And we did that. We blew the doors off of that. So at the end of the day when we're thinking of. John's absolutely right. This is a golden age in so many ways and we really can do these things and we shouldn't let the grown up problems of systems failing to figure out how to do that stand in the way of the educational opportunities that families want for their kids now. Because I love all of the good people working within systems to improve education here. I was one for a long time myself. But for those of us that have kids now in schools, their most optimistic ideas are going to be that it's going to take two decades to get where they want it to be for families right now. And we do very well at the fragile end of the income spectrum. And it's a true the microschooling movement is diversified in every ways. What can we do for them now? And the answer, John, as you're showing, improving is an awful lot.
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B
Let me ask this question as we start to wrap up here, which is, let's go maybe in reverse order of how we did it up front. So Don and Victoria and John, you can start to get in here first. But Don, what policy framework that you just mentioned, these three buckets that are getting measured, that Daniel Hamlin's doing, these battery of assessments and so forth. To look at these 60 micro schools, what would you be comfortable putting into a public policy framework versus leaving that as information and grassroots? Sort of bottoms up, where's your line on that? And I'd love to hear everyone's sort of perspective on that.
- [35:39]
A
So our school choice history in this country is somewhat addicted to accreditation. We've made a lot of great progress in truly micro school friendly accreditation models. So that's one important way to get this done. The state of Arkansas's Education Freedom accounts allow a microschool to come in and say, here's who we are, here are our qualifications, here's what success is defined as in our micro school, and then here are our results so that the state department of education can be evaluating the impact of the microschool in ways that matter to their stakeholders. So we're really going a long way towards measuring impact in ways that we hadn't been able to do before. And for microschools that are accepting taxpayer dollars, I think we're really looking to the early stages of that innovation and not locked into the clunky old systems of the past.
- [36:31]
B
John, you want to do it? Or Victoria, you want to jump in?
- [36:34]
F
I would just say we're totally fine with kind of measuring our students reading, writing, math abilities up to grade five, which in my opinion is about the point at which you get into reading to learn as opposed to learning to read. So I think that should be part of it. Now, dawn and I would probably differ on this because the real kind of true blue micro school movement is a lot more like, hey, the parents should be able to figure this out. This may not be one of their criteria for us. I think it's kind of like a price of entry for schools. Like, kids have to be able to read by the time they leave your school. So I think that's fine. But I do think that the human skills, which have been completely cut out of any high stakes assessment, we should start to think from a policy perspective how we start to integrate those better. Because we all know as parents, as educators, how important they are for our children's success in life. It's not just how much chemistry, you know, it's like, do you want to get a job? How much do you want to get a job? When you get 10 nos, do you keep going? Like, these things are very, very important for human success. Like, everybody up here probably has them in spades. And so I just think the school system's getting more serious about measuring things that we know are that important. Is really, really something we should think
- [37:57]
C
about
- [37:59]
D
from an accountability assessment perspective. In the US we over assess. I love that abroad, internationally there's countries that don't assess until 10th grade and that feels amazing. And I think that would relieve a lot of stress and pressure for some. But I understand that others want to see good information. And so one thing I think about is how can we feed information back and forth to our counterparts at the state level, at the state level or country level in your situation where in the state of Michigan they've built the Michigan Data Hub, 800 districts can connect into that. They can get all that testing data from ETS or Pearson or whoever does it now more quickly than they ever could before. But why not send that information back up to the state too of what's happening on the ground in the classrooms like that Two way street is critical and I think there can be change there at the outside of the assessment level. I lost my train of thought.
- [39:05]
B
No, good enough. Yeah.
- [39:06]
E
All right. On my side, I think the new skills, as John told they are amazing. Of course I want a kid that really wants a job and would go and has the capability to get a no and try harder. Okay. But I cannot change that. For or for less rigorous schools, I go in the opposite direction. My schools, they need more rigorous. Our kids, they don't have this willpower so strong. You know, like for generations they were with parents that didn't go to high school or even middle school sometimes, you know, so it's not that, oh, you have so many options. Will you opt to go to become a CEO of a big. Like they don't have this grip. Okay. So we need pressure together. Still need a lot of pressure. So I think I'm doing a good job in Sao Paulo, but putting more pressure into the system. I put pressure. That's what I do. And I would love and I think the solution John and colleagues, if I can understanding my system and my kids. Okay, now let's get like empathy. So important, right? I would love to teach empathy, but if I try to teach it and no measurement anyone won't teach it won't be teaching my schools. It's not going to be teached. So I need to measure and put pressure in everything. That's how I view it.
- [40:51]
B
Governor, final word.
- [40:53]
C
As a policymaker, in hearing the many options and the whys, why do we do what we do, whether it be in Brazil, whether it be in New Mexico and making pushing the legislature to make certain decisions and pass certain laws, or as a policymaker having the administration do things that the legislature is unwilling to do because often they too are unwilling to see what has happened for decades. I would be terrified if we didn't, if we evaluated our kids for the first time in the 10th grade, because then it would be, holy cow, we got to do this over. Can we have a do over?
- [41:27]
D
Because
- [41:30]
C
tell me how things have been and I'll tell you what they're going to be like if nothing has changed. For parents sake, for teachers sake. I love that there are options also for teachers as well as for the parents. But knowledge is what gives them those choices. If we're not giving them a ton of information about micro schools and AI schools and all the different things that are available and how you make it happen, getting them there, picking them up, making sure that they're fed in the places that they go. Because in public schools you get the free lunch and the free, whatever it may be if you don't have the finances for that. And so I'm hopeful that more things can come to the educational system. But I understand also why we zero in as number one, we're spending taxpayer dollars and number two, we have to create a foundation, a very strong foundation before we can add the blocks to our educational systems. And I thank you all for being here.
- [42:33]
B
I was going to say you all had a choice today. Hold these folks accountable with a nice round of applause. Thank you.