Ohio State Football and the Fallacy of Self-Accountability

A few weeks ago, I successfully predicted the exact number of points the University of Michigan would score against arch-rival Ohio State in their annual football showdown, thus outperforming legions of so-called sports experts while inadvertantly illustrating the fallacy of self-accountability in K-12 and higher education.

The prediction came at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), where I presented a paper on college rankings. The point of the paper, which we'll be re-publishing here at Education Sector in a few weeks, was to parse criticisms of the U.S. News and World Report rankings and criticisms of rankings per se. I wrote:

Reasonable consumers of rankings understand...that the real-world difference between institutions on a ranking list doesn't necessarily correspond to the ordinal difference.... If Ohio State's football team finishes the season ranked #1 in the country due its 14-0 record and 17-point average margin of victory, including a crushing 56-3 defeat of Michigan in front of 107,501 heartbroken fans in Ann Arbor, while the #2 and #3 ranked teams both finished at 12-2, people understand that the difference between #1 and #2 is bigger than the difference between #2 and #3.

The paper was scheduled for a late afternoon symposium, and I spent the preceding hours listening to discusions like "Community Colleges as a Critique of Neo-Liberalism." So when my turn to speak arrived, I didn't realize that my beloved Buckeyes had suffered a grievious home loss to Illinois, curse them and all they hold dear, just a few hours earlier, ending my hopes for an undefeated season. The Michigan game was yesterday, and I was way off on the first part of the score -- Ohio State managed only 14 points, not 56.

BUT--I was exactly right about Michigan. They scored only 3 points in losing to OSU for the fourth consecutive year and the sixth time in the seven-year career of OSU coach Jim Tressel, ending a regular season that began with humiliating home loss to a Division I-AA school, putting Michigan coach Lloyd Carr's career in jeopardy and vaulting the Buckeyes to their third consecutive Big Ten championship and a spot in the Rose Bowl. Clearly, I need to put together a chart comparing my on-the-record prediction with those of all the alleged football experts and pundits, as a means of selling a subscription-only tout newsletter to gamblers and pigskin junkies.

The point being, if you let individuals or organizations define how they'll be publicly evaluated, this is what you get. People are people, and few are going to be reliably objective about owning up to their successes and failures in a neutral way, particularly when the stakes are high. That's really what The Pangloss Index is all about, as well as this recent piece on higher education accountability I wrote for Change.

This principle was also in display on the front page of this morning's Washington Post, which documented how many states have defined "persistently dangerous" school (one of the eleven Pangloss components) in such a way that even the most violence-wracked schools aren't identified. This shows how nominally holding someone accountable for something, but letting them define how that something will be measured, is worse than not holding them accountable at all, because it creates the illusion of accountability that doesn't exist. When California education officials say "there are no persistently dangerous schools in this state," as they have every year since NCLB was enacted, someone might actualy believe them.

This also deserves comment:

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) has introduced a bill that changes "persistently dangerous schools" to "schools which do not have a safe climate for academic achievement," on the grounds that the name alone was causing anxiety over the policy.

"It's not going to be as threatening for schools," she said. "This will remove the stigma associated with high violence."

Chuck Buckler, Maryland's director of student services and alternative programs, said the original term is unpleasant -- akin to telling parents that they were sending their children to a war zone.

"I don't like the title at all," he said. "When this all came about, I said, 'This is something that's going to be a death knell for a school. Everybody will transfer out.' "

He said he was surprised to find that most parents at the six persistently dangerous schools in Baltimore didn't transfer their children to other schools.

The designation, he found, caused communities to rally around their schools and try to make them safer, an effort he said had brought improvements.

Do we really want to remove the stigma associated with high violence? Because that strikes me as one of the more useful stigmas to have. Maybe parents will try to pull their kids out of persistently dangerous schools, or maybe--as in Baltimore--they'll try to make the school less dangerous. But surely both outcomes are better than pretending the school isn't violent, and leaving students to suffer the consequences.