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What does it take to get politicians and the general public to abandon misleading ideas, such as, “Anyone who tries can pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” or that “Teachers are the most important factor in determining the achievement of our youth”? Many ordinary citizens and politicians believe these statements to be true, even though life and research informs us that such statements are usually not true.

till further discouraging news for those who advocate testing as a way to reform schools comes from the PISA assessments (The Program for International Student Assessment). Nations with high-stakes testing have generally gone down in scores from 2000 to 2003, and then again by 2006. Finland, on the other hand, which has no high-stakes testing, and an accountability system that relies on teacher judgment and school level professionalism much more than tests, has shown growth over these three PISA administrations (Sahlberg, 2011).

Now, in the USA, our parents are a greater determiner of our income in life than either our weight or our height.

We added people based on talent, not on the proximity by location. 

In the knowledge economy, not doing so would be foolish and would limit our prospects. The deciding factor was prospective team members’ connectedness.

With the rise of broadband, a new factor has come into play: connectedness. Connectedness allows companies big and small to exist as a stateless entity.

t doesn’t take a great quarterback rating to win games; it takes a team effort. Have the elected officials in Austin m

1. What if… a community received quarterly dashboard updates correlating the number of community mentoring hours, internships or even online parental homework assistance with critical student success factors such as student attendance, school climate and academic performance?

2. What if… doing something that is good for you, such as enrolling in a spinning class, could offset the electricity costs for schools?

3. What if… we replaced conventional currencies with other value exchanges that made it possible for parents and community members to contribute subject matter expertise or other resources to schools in exchange for extended hour care for their children or use of school facilities?

Policy recommendation: Immediately implement a new teacher evaluation system based 50% on student assessment data. Prohibit the use of experience or degree level as a basis for compensation.

Policy recommendation:  Set in place a strategy to turn over all host district schools, across all grade levels to the charter operator.

Conclusions & Implications: The strongest correlate of true teaching effectiveness was the estimate of teacher contribution to student achievement on the same test a year later. However, this correlation was only modest (.30). All other measures including effectiveness measures based on alternative tests and student, parent and administrator perceptions of teacher effectiveness were less correlated with the original value-added estimate, thus raising questions about the usefulness of any of these other measures. Because the value-added measure turns out to be the best predictor of itself in a subsequent year, this estimate alone trumps all others in terms of usefulness for making decisions regarding teacher retention (especially in times of staffing reduction) and should also be considered a primary factor in compensation decisions. Note that while it may appear that school administrators, students and their parents have highly consistent views regarding which teachers are more and less effective (note the higher correlations across administrator ratings of teachers, and student and parent ratings), we consider these findings unimportant because none of these perception-based ratings were as correlated with the original value-added estimate as the value-added estimate was with itself (which of course, is the TRUE measure of effectiveness).