If ever there was a time to rethink student growth and the effects of schooling, this has to be it. We are all witnessing an existential crisis, one where we, as a country, are doing more poorly than just about every other country in the world.

And not once has anyone said that the problem is due to uncompetitive schools, or the achievement gap, or ineffective teachers, or anything else associated with our metrics for accountability with respect to educational quality.

Rather, we see a national crisis being “led” by far too many people who clearly had (or would have had) high growth scores in their day, but lack souls, compassion, character, judgment and courage. And they sure as hell don’t seem to have any accountability.

Those deficits are literally responsible for killing or harming thousands of people in this country, with the greatest impact being on the people that they couldn’t care less about

And so, if we’re going to try to recreate accountability systems, we can no longer just say, well yeah, those “soft” things are important, but they’re too hard to measure – so we’re just going to focus on math and reading scores.

To be clear, the last thing I’m suggesting is to start testing for soul, compassion, character, judgment and courage. But when we have a system where there is only one currency that has purchasing power, we wind up with far too many highly educated but dangerous people.

And the one thing that those high verbal and math scores provided them is an ability to exercise their amoral evil, greed, and deception with that much more skill. I’m not sure what the answer is – but I do know we’re fools if we just go back to what we were doing.

At this moment in time, our first thoughts should not be how do we make up for reading and math score losses. I’d opt for focusing on how we use education to restore our humanity. Not sure how we do it but I’m open to suggestions.

Some humans ain't human
Some people ain't kind
You open up their hearts
And here's what you'll find
A few frozen pizzas
Some ice cubes with hair
A broken Popsicle
You don't want to go there. #JohnPrineRIP