Education isn’t nearly as technical, bureaucratic, or complicated as the industry would have you believe.
You can dress it up with as many pedagogical terms and best-practice KPIs as you want. But at its core, only one thing really matters: What do we want our children to be know and do by the time they graduate?
But as first-year Superintendent of Public Instruction Mo Green kicks off his statewide tour this month, we’re getting a lot more of the former and none of the latter. The product he’s selling: “Achieving Educational Excellence,” a five-year plan packed with targets, jargon, and a new reporting bureaucracy.
It sounds ambitious. But it’s hollow at its core — and built on the same faulty assumptions that have hollowed out public trust in our education system.
A statewide plan with no real levers
To his credit, Green lays out specific goals that will be easy to measure. Things like:
92% four-year graduation rate
ACT average of 20
30% AP participation
89% market share for public schools
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