A great education leader who lives in Houston once said to me: “as long you’re worrying about state test scores, you’re still plugged into the matrix.”

His point: so long as public schools are held accountable via government tests, the incentives for educators will be about doing well on those tests.

If you believe performance on these tests is a useful measure of learning, then staying plugged into the matrix might be a good thing.

If you feel that parents, schools, universities, and employers are best suited to develop measures of learning, then you probably want to get out of the matrix and align incentives around different outcome measures.

In the long run, I think it’s probably a good idea to leave the matrix, so long as leaving the matrix is accompanied with a shift towards relinquishment, whereby educators can run schools and families can choose from these schools.

However, as long as we’re going to stay in the matrix, I think the two most important things are ensuring that the matrix is:

1) heavily weighted towards academic growth (rather than absolute scores) and;

2) that it identifies and acts on bottom performing schools and subgroups (where research indicates accountability helps the most).

Given that much discretion will be left to the states, time will tell if this matrix is a better than the previous matrix.

But either way, have no doubt about it: we’re still plugged into the matrix.