Have we reached the limits of our traditional school system's capacity to deal with the diversity of learners that come into our schools today?

To do this we need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something -- a primary education -- to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right -- whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others -- rather than supplying or rearranging resources. The shift is extremely powerful...

We can see an emerging crisis in our schools, while, on the other hand, we see a renaissance for learning. The question then simply becomes: would a completely different perspective that builds on the latter, be a more productive focus for us than the continued, largely unproductive, public debate around the former?

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).