Rural Matters

the “father of the yellow school bus.” Not exactly heretical.

So it should seem a little unusual that in the age of orthodoxies like standardization, centralization, and accountability, Nebraska should produce the most heretical education leader in the nation.

But that has happened. His name is Doug Christensen, he is Nebraska’s Commissioner of Education, and he is a heretic.

He is a heretic who just recently got a sustained standing ovation after giving a speech on – hold on to your hats, you who are slow to excite – classroom assessment. Classroom assessment? A topic so esoteric that it makes actuarial science sound fun.

Christensen doesn’t look the part of either heretic or orator. With a ruddy Scandinavian complexion, broad shoulders, strong chin, and full head of sandy colored hair, he looks a lot more like a Big Red middle linebacker than a chief state school officer.

The truth is that Christensen is not a heretic by nature. Times make the man. And in the age of No Child Left Behind, any educator of integrity ought to preach a little heresy.

Especially when it comes to assessment. And preach Christensen does. He rails against the orthodoxy of “centralization, standardization, and high stakes consequences,” saying they “create cultures that literally suck the oxygen out of the work” of classroom teachers and “treat students, teachers, and data as ‘commodities’ to be manipulated as variables in some kind of strange economy or in some perverse experiment.” Not quite Bryan's "Cross of Gold" hyperbole, but pretty good rhetoric.

Christensen says that curricular standards and assessments should not be designed to label kids and schools as failures, but to help teachers and students understand whether their practices are working and how they should change. He talks about empowering students and teachers by making assessments a routine and on-going part of instruction in the classroom, where feedback is instantaneous. He says assessment is seldom an event but a continuous process. Tell that to your neighborhood standardized testing company.

Geez, a middle linebacker who knows something about assessment research.

And he has used what he knows to design a state assessment system that relies on local classroom assessments based either on local standards or on Nebraska’s state standards, which, in contrast to the flabby and exudative volumes most states have produced in a race to claim “most rigorous,” are lean and muscular and clear cut.

In Nebraska, the local assessment system has to pass muster with external experts. The assessment itself, as well as the student performance it assesses, are rated on the state’s accountability website. Imagine that. Assessing the assessment. Out-accounting the accountability czars.

There is also a statewide writing assessment that is scored both in state and by out-of-state experts, for control, and all districts must also choose a norm-referenced test to see how Nebraska kids are stacking up nationally.

But would this decentralized, heretical system focused on intelligent use of assessment skills at the classroom level pass muster with the No Child Left Behind police in Washington, D.C? Could they imagine an assessment world that is not threatening, not controlled from above, not totally removed from the practice of teaching and learning?

“No!” they could not, said federal department of education regulators last June. Nebraska was one of only two states whose system was flatly declared “non-approved.”

But Christensen persisted. He asked them to take a closer look. He sent them reams of documentation of the theoretical and practical details of the program. He invited Assistant Secretary of Education Henry Johnson and his assessment regulators to come to Omaha to observe this system in practice.

There they were met by teachers – not by state officials or academic testing experts. Well, except these teachers are assessment experts. They spent a day explaining the system and why it works, how it empowers them to teach and their charges to learn, how it was changing the classroom, how it brought joy back into their lives as teachers. How it worked to improve performance.

Christensen says he was proud of their passion, and proud too of their “assessment literacy.” Assessment literacy? Where did they get this guy? If he’s not careful he’s going to make people think that ordinary people can do extra-ordinary things when you have faith in them.

“As I sat there and watched our educators and listened to their words, I swear I could hear their hearts and it was all I could do to keep tears from rolling. What a profound and proud moment that was,” he says.

I’m beginning to understand the standing ovation.

It worked. Assistant Secretary Johnson went back to Washington and wrote a letter taking Nebraska off the non-approved listing. Heretic blessing.

Heretics, of course, often become orthodox with time. That’s because they are not afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes. And they are not afraid to march to a different drummer, defy oppressive rules, and cry a tear or two for the sake of cleansing the soul. Heresy often prevails, because it liberates people from the unreasonable. Then heretics become leaders.

We could use a few more heretics as Congress ambles toward its date with reauthorizing No Child Left Behind. And we could use a few more leaders like Doug Christensen.