Episode 6: The Gamification of Public Education!

 One cohort of juniors can tilt an entire high school’s rating. That stark truth has turned accountability into a game with real stakes, and we’re pulling back the curtain on the rules, the pressure, and the plays that actually work without hollowing out learning. As a high school principal, I walk through how Nebraska’s ACT-centered system shapes curriculum, culture, and day-to-day decisions—and why ignoring it isn’t an option.

We start by tracing the path from early-2000s accountability to today’s reliance on a single high school exam. Then we get practical. I break down a three-part strategy leaders can use right now: align English, math, and science curriculum tightly to tested standards; build a school culture that lifts attendance and engagement; and run weekly PLCs that track learning by target and deliver timely interventions. You’ll hear how we schedule intervention blocks in a large school, how we message test day to students who may never apply to college, and how small, intentional incentives can focus effort without gimmicks.

Beyond the scoreboard, we wrestle with what gets left out when ratings ride on one measure: arts, social studies, music, and the rich experiences that make a campus feel alive. I share the “1% better” mindset we use with staff and students to drive steady improvement—tightening bell ringers, sharpening closure, improving parent communication—so the gains stick. If you’re a teacher, admin, or parent wondering how to protect authentic learning while meeting state expectations, this is a concrete, field-tested playbook.

If this conversation helps you think more clearly about standards, culture, and student support, follow the show, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review so more educators can find it.

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Transcript

Principal JL: 0:59

Are you stuck in a career that's going nowhere? Are you thinking about going back to college, but you're like, oh, wait a minute, that's a lot of debt that I can incur. Well, imagine a life unshackled by the weight of college debt. A journey where prosperity does not hinge on a parchment paper. Breaking the college debt chains, how to get wealthy without a degree, elevates its possibility into a tangible plan, painting a future for financial freedom and vocational passion intersected without the customary stopover at a university campus. If that's something you're interested in, go ahead, go to Amazon.com and get the audio book or the paperback book of Breaking the College Debt Chains, How to Get Wealthy Without a Degree by Jeff Linden. Episode six The Gamification of Public Education. Hey everybody, this is Principal JL. It's been a long time, about a year since I've done a podcast, but hey, there's something that is on my mind I'd love to share with you guys. It's basically some things I've been thinking about. And what I've been thinking about really is how public education has been gamified. And to explain that, we need to go back a little bit and understand in the United States, back in the early 2000s, they decided to have more accountability in public education, more they introduced standards and state assessments. Prior to that, there was really no accountability system in place. So that's where your no child left behind, mixed with your individuals with disability acts, which you can call them nickelby and idea, came into play because we wanted our kids to have a quality education and making sure that the schools were being held accountable. And which I am totally for. Like I'm okay with accountability. Like when I started college in '98, there really was no talk about this. And then when I went back in 03, all I heard was about state standards, state assessments. We got to have accountability. So my whole 16-year career as an educator, all I've known is state standards and accountability. But during my time, I have gone through basically like it three sets. There might be more. I might be missing some, but there was the STARS testing that I had to do, where after each standard, I have to test each kid on that standard and I'd mark them and I'd save it in a folder and then submit that into the state later. Then we had our NSCAS. I'm familiar with that, being a 712 teacher as well as 712 principal. The NSCAS were 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade at that time was the way to measure student success and to figure out how to do that. And now we've gotten to the point to where we are just doing the ACT at the high school. Now the state standards. So I'm talking about the state of Nebraska. It may be different in your state, but in the state of Nebraska, we have from third grade to eighth grade. They take a yearly state assessment. You don't have to take a state assessment in ninth grade, tenth grade, or twelfth grade in Nebraska. You take it your junior year. So it kind of makes you wonder like, what the heck are we doing? Now, we also have rules in place through the Nebraska Department of Education that we have to have assessments for freshmen, for sophomores, you know, as well as our state assessment ACT. Those are in place. We do do that, but the thing is, there's no consistency in what the state is requiring you. So, in a way, this assessment, the ACT, is the like the gold standard of what we want our kids to know and learn before they graduate. And it's also what the state of Nebraska, and it may be different in other states, uses to determine if your school is an excellent school, a great school, good school, or if it needs improvement. And I kind of find that really interesting because we're saying that one grade, that junior class, is going to hold the mantle for the whole entire high school. You got to remember, we still have freshmen, we have sophomores, we have seniors that make up a high school. And currently I am a high school principal. And so I find that just mind-boggling. And that's the number one way that we measure our schools. Now, we do other things with measuring our schools. We look at, you know, the chronic abteism, daily average attendance rate, suspension rates, graduation rate, and also state testing participation. Those are things that are also in play with an assessment of a school in the state of Nebraska. But the number one way to increase your rating or your designated indicator or decrease it is your state standard, your ACT state standard. So what I'm saying is ever since the early 2000s, public education got gamified because the way to for your school to be, you know, basically accounted for, or basically how they measured your school was through these state assessments. And so they'd give you a designation of excellent, great, good, or needs improvement. If you come a needs improvement school, you have one year to fix it. And if you don't, the state comes in and they'll tell you how to run your school. And that's basically what they do there. So I find it just mind-boggling that we have our junior class, and that's who we're going to use to determine if my high school is a excellent great or good school. Now, why I say they gamify it is because of this. We are teaching to a test. There's no doubt about it. You're telling us the ACT is the gold standard. We have to make sure we have the information that is needed for these kids to know and learn before they sit for that test. And the other thing is, is I know we got to do a better job, but we got to be able to figure out a way to assess our freshmen and our sophomores better to where we can get them more prepared for the ACT. Now we do, our sophomores do take a pre-ACT, and our freshmen do take the IBTS right now. I think the pre-ACT is a pretty decent educator of what our kids need to know so we can get them ready for the ACT. ITBS, I think that's something, you know, I don't, I'm not loving it, but it's something I think we need to look at. There's other ways I think we can do better to get those kids where we need them to be. But at the time, all I'm gonna talk about is the gamification of public education. So what they're doing is saying, hey, we're gonna grade your school on how well your juniors do. Well, guess what? Every year we have a new group of juniors that got to take that test. So based off of that group of juniors will determine what your rank is or what your what your designation is. So with that said, in the state of Nebraska, the ACT is our biggest, you know, indicator of where your school sits. Like I said, we do some other things. But the thing is, if we're only looking at like our math or English and our science departments for this one test, we're not even accounting for our art department, our social studies department. We're not accounting for our band, our choirs, our other things that make up a school. Like there's so many things that make up a high school. We're gonna say about 22 to 30 percent of our high school is what's gonna carry the mantle for the designation if we're a great and excellent or a good school or needs improvement school. To me, that's just crazy. So, what we have to do is we gotta play the game. There's no way around it. The state says this is what you gotta do. Guess what? We gotta play a game. So it kind of reminds me of when I was in the military, I would do basic training or AIT training. And I learned through the basic training process um when I was going through in the military that the drill sergeant's goal was to get you to conform to the military rules and procedures. That's what they wanted you to do. So they were really good about figuring out how to push you, how to make you conform. You start realizing that, hey, this is a game. If I play the game and I figure out what to do and what not to do and keep myself in line and do the things I need to do, they're gonna leave me alone. It's kind of the same thing. We are playing a game in public education by saying that's our standard. ACT is our standard. We have to make sure that we have our curriculum aligned to those ACT state standards. Because if we don't, we're not gonna score well on this test. I go, and that's sad to say that we are in public education teaching to a test. We're teaching to these standards, and there's nothing wrong with teaching to a standard, but that's kind of where we're at. That's the name of the game right now. So, how do you how do you win this game? Well, there's some ways that you can win this game as a as an educational leader. The number one thing you gotta do is you gotta figure out what is the expectation from your state? What assessment are they gonna use to basically evaluate if your school hits one of these designations? The designation in Nebraska's are you know the excellent, the great, the good, and needs improvement. Those are the designations. What do we need to teach in our curriculum to make sure those kids get it? So basically, curriculum alignment to your state assessments, number one. So, one thing that we're gonna make sure we do is we're gonna take our English, our math, and our science department. They're gonna go through the ACT state standards and they're gonna make sure they align up with our standards that we are teaching in our school. Because if we don't have curriculum alignment, our kids are not gonna do very well on that test. So if we're teaching all these other things besides what's on that test or what's majority on that test, our kids won't score well. But if we align our curriculum to what's on that test, our kids will score better. And it don't matter where you're at. If you are teaching the standards that require for those kids to do well, they will do well. That's how you start to win the game. That's what you have to do is to put yourself in a position to win the game. Other things you could do is building a culture with your staff in your building. Like you gotta create a culture that people want to be a part of. Kids want to come to school. And I'm telling you, attendance is a pandemic, an epidemic, not pandemic, an epidemic throughout the country to where everybody's struggling with getting kids into the door so they can learn. And there's some things you can do with that. I know we're looking at creating a brand new attendance policy to help with that. You know, I don't know what other schools are doing, but that's kind of what we're doing. But our culture in our school is basically we want kids to come to school. We will want them, we welcome them, we want to make this a safe learning environment to where when they come to school, this is one of the best parts of their day. We make sure they got food, we make sure they're taken care of, we make sure their basic needs are met so they can learn. Because if they are in our school, we got to teach them. You know, we can't do anything when they're not there, but when they're there, our goal is to teach the heck out of them. So building a culture where you have a welcoming staff, a welcoming the kids, making them feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves. Another thing that we do that you can do as well, is we we really big on our PLCs, our professional learning communities. Our professional learning communities meet once a week. At the end of the day on Wednesdays, we shut down or dismiss the students early. We have an hour every Wednesday of every week for our teachers to meet with each other, and we call this our similar response teams. And these similar response teams are basically checking each student by target. So instead of calling them standards, we call them targets or learning targets or power essentials. So those are basically our standards. So we're looking at each student by target and we're determining hey, which kids get it, what kids don't, what do we do when they do, what do we give what they don't? You know, we we run the four questions that you run in PLC. And so our teachers have done a really good job of that. And then what they do is they take that information and they develop intervention groups for kids. So, you know, one teacher may be teaching this topic, this other teacher may be teaching this topic, and these teachers are sending these kids to those topics because that's what they need. And so we we do intervention times four times a week, every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. We have 40 minutes that we stop schooling and we send our kids to interventions. And it and it can happen. We're we're a school of a thousand students and we make it work. It's crazy, it's it's a lot of work, but it's work that you have to do to win the game of education. Finally, the last thing I like to do is what do you do to motivate students to do well on these state standards? You know, you can be like, hey, you know, we're going to do all these fun things and give them rewards, but it doesn't have to be that crazy. I know for us, we allow we don't allow energy drinks, but for one day and one day only, I allow those juniors to bring in energy drinks. So between their their break, their one break that they get on the ACT, they can have that energy drink so they can stay awake. So that's something I kind of do outside the box, but we also make sure they have breakfast and food and different things like that. Before we even take the test, I will bring our juniors together and I will talk to them about hey, it's your time to shine, it's your time to do your very best. You know, not all of you guys want to go to college, and I get that. It's okay. You don't have to go to college. You know what? This ACT test is basically how we are viewed upon by our public, our community, as well as the state. And the state wants to see us do well. And if we do well, you know, we're gonna get a good score. So I'm gonna challenge you guys to do your very, very best. We already know you learn the stuff you need to know. We already know because we have aligned that curriculum for you. So therefore, go do your very best. So I talked to him about that. One other thing we did this year is we started talking about being 1% better. Basically, what that means, you find something to be 1% better at every day. So you're looking at incremental changes, and for everybody, it's different. I'm asking our staff to be 1% better, I'm asking myself to be 1% better, I'm asking my students to be 1% better. Hey, it could be as simple as, hey, I'm gonna be on time to all my classes. Great, that's your goal for the day, and that's your goal for the week. Go do that. For a teacher, it could be as simple as, hey, I want to get a lot better at bell ringers. Oh, I'm gonna really work on my bell ringers. And once they get that down, then they may say, Hey, I want to get really good at closure, and then they go work on that. As a principal, it might be, hey, I got to get better at communicating. So I need to make sure my communication's on point. Hey, I need to do better at getting back to parents within a timely manner. Now, these are things I actually do well, but those are things that I've worked on incrementally throughout the year because those are things I could always get better, making sure I'm communicating well and I'm getting back to people in a timely manner. So there's a lot of different things. So having that belief and that mindset that you're going to get better every day also helps build that culture and helps build what you're trying to do within your school. Public education has been gamified. There is a way to win it. If you align your curriculum, you create a culture, and you do your professional learning communities with fidelity, you'll be in great shape to be successful. Well, that's all the time I got for today. It was great talking to you guys today. Hopefully, you find this episode useful. Thank you guys for your time. And till next time, stay awesome. Are you stuck in a career that's going nowhere? Are you thinking about going back to college, but you're like, oh, wait a minute, that's a lot of debt that I can incur. Well, imagine a life unshackled by the weight of college debt, a journey where prosperity does not hinge on a parchment paper. Breaking the college debt chains, how to get wealthy without a degree, elevates its possibility into a tangible plan, painting a future for financial freedom and vocational passion intersected without the customary stopover at a university campus. If that's something you're interested in, go ahead, go to Amazon.com and get the audiobook or the paperback book of Breaking the College Debt Chains How to Get Wealthy Without a Degree by Jeff Linden.