Tag: NFL

Sunday Morning Quarterback

Posted on | by Sam

Earlier this week the DC Public Charter School Board released its latest rankings of every charter school operating in the nation’s capital. Some schools earned higher or lower scores than last year — each school is rated either Tier 1, 2 or 3 — but the majority did not change. No surprise there: these things take time, not to mention the fact that our system for evaluating whether a school is high- or low-performing remains imperfect at best.

Still, the report worried me, mostly because of the language charter leaders used to frame their reactions to the rankings. “If your results aren’t good after a fair period of time, you need to lose your right to operate,” said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, or FOCUS. And Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said this: “You can’t tread water and stay a Tier 2 school. Each school has to continue to become better.”

On one level, my response is, “Well, of course.” No school should be allowed to continually provide a subpar learning environment, and every school should be proactively seeking ways to improve. Yet what I hear in the undercurrents of these comments is an expectation that schools achieve quick results, sustain a linear march to excellence, and operate under a no-excuses culture of expectations. And maybe it’s just coincidence because we’re in DC, but when I hear that kind of language from the top, I think of the Washington Redskins. And when I consider all we need to do to improve the city’s schools, I can’t think of a worse organizational model for systemic change and sustained success.

For those that don’t follow it closely, the Redskins are a storied NFL franchise with a long history of success — just not recently. In fact, since current owner Dan Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Redskins have become a perennial cellar dweller and experienced nearly constant change at the top — seven different head coaches over the past thirteen seasons, to be precise.

This is not exactly a recipe for success. Yet Snyder has spent goo gobs of money over that time, and he clearly, desperately, wants to win. So do the players. So why aren’t the Skins winning? And what does any of this have to do with the DC charter school community?

Simply put, what has plagued the Skins is the impatience of Dan Snyder, and the jittery culture he has established. He overpaid for free agents instead of building through the draft. He failed to consider the ways different pieces come together to form a team — that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And by hiring and firing coaches whenever things didn’t turn around quickly enough, he ensured that his team would never have time to establish a sustainable, long-term road map for success.

By contrast, consider the approach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the NFL’s oldest and most successful franchises. In my 42 years on earth, the Steelers have won six Super Bowls, and played in eight. Along the way, they’ve also had nine losing seasons.  And yet over that entire period, the Pittsburgh Steelers have maintained a consistent organizational identity. They’ve always built through the draft. And in 42 years, while the rest of the sports world lives and dies on each game, they’ve had just three head coaches: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin.

Which takes us back to the comments of Robert Cane and Naomi DeVaux, and some lessons from the gridiron we would be wise to apply to the classroom as well: Sometimes, successful organizations do tread water. And always, the mark of a great culture is the extent to which it is aligned around core values and principles, and the extent to which its leaders create a culture of security, not anxiety, by their words and actions.

What are the core values and principles that define the shared vision of the DC Public Charter School community? And when it comes to constructing a path for sustained excellence, how can charter leaders be more like the Steelers — and less like the Redskins? There’s no single answer to those questions, but this much seems clear: when it comes to making hiring or firing decisions based solely on a school’s rating (or a team’s record), I can guarantee what legendary Steelers owner Art Rooney would say: that dog just won’t hunt.

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

What We Can Learn from Tim Tebow

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What We Can Learn from Tim Tebow

Late last night, alone in my TV room and still struggling to get back onto east-coast time, I watched Tim Tebow’s improbable 95-yard game-winning drive, and marveled at the uniqueness of his unfolding storyline.

As the dumbstruck commentators on NFL Network made clear, we are witnessing something unprecedented in the otherwise rigid, groupthinkian world of the NFL – a team that has completely (and, thus far, successfully) adjusted its overall strategy to align with the strengths of its newest, most essential player.

Well, that’s not exactly it; after all, franchises often build around their best player to build a championship team. But what’s so noteworthy is that in order to support its new field general, the Denver Broncos are also ignoring decades of conventional wisdom about what a successful NFL quarterback looks like – and does.

To wit: look at the three top-ranked quarterbacks in the league – Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees – and there’s a unanimity to their core competencies: a quick release and accurate delivery. Judged against this standard, Tebow might as well be playing flag football; his release is long, slow, and awkward, and he is painfully inaccurate (as evidenced by his 44.8% completion rate). Indeed, for the bulk of the games he has played thus far in his short career, you almost want to look away, so unusual is it to see a player at that position so clearly ill-equipped to do what NFL quarterbacks do most of the time: stand tall in the pocket, read the defense, and quickly deliver the ball into tight windows.

But then there are those other moments – like last night’s game-winning drive – when Tebow does what he does better than anyone: get outside the pocket, read the defense, react to what he sees, and run to the open space. He is a classic option quarterback – a skill-set of great value to many of the country’s most successful college programs, and of little interest to the NFL, where, conventional wisdom has it, the overall speed of the professional game, coupled with the excessive pounding a quarterback takes while running the option, make the offense a non-starter.

To be sure, there are other factors at play that make Tebow such a charismatic, polarizing figure – particularly his deep, public, evangelical faith. Purely from a sports perspective, however, what makes him so compelling is that, despite his seemingly fatal weaknesses as a player, he just. Keeps. Winning. (the Broncos were 1-4 when he became the starter; after last night’s upset victory, they are now an even 5-5 and within reach of the playoffs).

Of course, the bulk of the Tebow story has yet to be told, and the overwhelming likelihood remains that one of the league’s more archetypal quarterbacks will be the one to raise this year’s championship trophy. But for now, the education of Tim Tebow is also a chance for the rest of us to be reminded of some essential truths: that we must continually create spaces for new ways of seeing and understanding old systems; that we should always play to a person’s strengths, not their weaknesses; and that, sometimes, our institutions – and not the individuals who inhabit them – should be the ones to do the adjusting. As Williams College president Mark Hopkins advised one of his graduating classes, nearly two centuries ago (!), the mark of a true learning organization is “to regard the mind, not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, or as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and to feel – and to dare, to do, and to suffer.”

Run Timmy, RUN!

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Good, Bad & Ugly of Value-Added Analysis

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Good, Bad & Ugly of Value-Added Analysis

I’m on the road all week — from DC to Oregon to Philadelphia to Oklahoma City — and everywhere I go people seem to be talking about the L.A. Times’ recent expose into the city’s school teachers, and the extent to which individual teachers are either helping students learn — or holding them back.

The conversations are based on the Times’ decision to use value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year. Thickening the plot, the Times produced this report using seven years of data the school district had — but had never analyzed. As the paper explains: “Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student’s past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student’s actual performance after a year is the ‘value’ that the teacher has added or subtracted.”

Because the idea of value-added analysis, or VAA, seems to be everywhere in K-12 education discussions (it has been embraced by the Obama administration, and many of the field’s leading philanthropic entities, from Gates to Walton to Broad, are intrigued by the approach), I want to offer what I see as the good, the bad and the ugly of VAA — and of the Times’ decision to use VAA as the foundation of its landmark report:

The Good — As the Times rightly reports, “though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.” This has been a catastrophic failure by all of us to this point, since all sides agree the effectiveness of the teacher is the single most important in-school factor toward determining the extent to which young people will learn. Children should not have their minds subjected to a roulette wheel of opportunity; every child deserves a highly-effective teacher. And although the Times article is primarily about the VAA scores, it identifies other core conditions the most effective teachers shared, including the encouragement of critical thinking and “the surest sign of a teacher’s effectiveness — the engagement of his or her students.” In this way, the Times demonstrates its seriousness in trying to unpack the mystery of what makes some teachers more effective than others. And we need as much of that as we can get.

The Bad — Unfortunately, despite some caveats throughout about how VAA would only make up a percentage of a teacher’s future evaluation, the reality is that VAA is assuming a disproportionate share of the emerging analyses. The Times says as much when it admits that VAA “offers the closest thing available to an objective assessment of teachers.”

But what if the closest thing available isn’t actually the closest thing to the truth? Based on this logic, the NFL should only draft college players based on the things it can observe objectively — like their 40-yard dash times, or the number of times they can bench press 225 pounds. Yet as any fan knows, this isn’t the best path toward finding the best players (but don’t tell Al Davis). And a similar approach in education is also not the best path, precisely because it simplifies an extremely complex undertaking. After all, if the only thing I’m going to be evaluated on is my speed, why bother working on my pass-catching ability? And if in reality all that matters is my VAA score (despite what people say), why do anything other than focus on preparing children for the tests? So the “bad” is less about the VAA scores, and more about their being used in relative isolation. When we do that, we get Campbell’s Law.

The Ugly — I see the ugly aspects of this unfolding on both sides of the debate. For the Times, I think their article reflects their own limited understanding of education, and teaching, and the core conditions of a powerful learning environment. Journalism exists to educate the general public about core issues that are essential to our civic health and well-being. The Times says it wrote the article to help parents stop feeling like they’re in the dark when it comes to their children’s schooling. Yet the main thing I notice when I speak to my friends who are parents (and non-educators) is how much they feel they must rely on test scores to gauge a school’s overall health — even though any good educator knows it provides no more than a partial sliver of the picture a parent needs in order to make a sound decision about where they should send their child. Does the Times’ study help paint a fuller picture for parents? Or is it merely painting over the same narrow corner of a canvas that is in fact much larger, richer, and more opaque than we’d like it to be?

On the other side, I see that the L.A. Teachers Union has already called for a massive boycott of the Times, and is looking into legal action.

Can I please apply to be the Union’s communications director?

Why wouldn’t their lead story be a public statement that uses the article to amplify the shared need for better information about how students learn and what teachers can do to be more effective — and then restate that test scores from year to year represent a single piece of the picture that is both valuable and overvalued? In effect, use the Times article to focus attention on the need for better, more balanced information about student learning and teacher effectiveness, not simply to excoriate a major newspaper and deny any validity of VAA whatsoever.

But that’s not what they did, of course, which will only contribute to the growing national sense that teachers’ unions are the most convenient villains in an evolving script that is much more complex than good guys v. bad guys (or reformers v. the status quo).

Once again, I’m left with the same simple thought: We can do better.