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Whereas the best public-school systems in the world—Finland, Singapore, South Korea—recruit all of their teachers from the top third or better of their college graduates, in America the majority come from the bottom two-thirds, with just 14 percent of those entering teaching each year in high-needs schools coming from the upper third. And the numbers may be getting worse. According to a recent survey conducted by McKinsey, a meager 9 percent of top-third graduates have any interest in teaching whatsoever.

teacher quality is a national priority: Educators are paid competitively; education schools are highly selective; jobs are guaranteed for those credentialed; and professional development is ample and subsidized.

“If you want to change public education, you have to do something that feels like a threat to the status quo,” says Canada. “If we don’t fight about this, if we can shake and be friends, we ain’t going to change. And if we don’t change, huge numbers of kids ain’t going to make it. There is no Superman coming to save them. All they have is us.”

I think a lot of his decisions are based on leadership,” Smith says of Edwards and his management. “You’ve got to have the right people on the bus, but not only that, they’ve got to be on the right seats on the bus.

instead, it tells teachers to seek their own content and align it to the subject curriculum

Teachers are expected to share lessons with colleagues electronically via ANGEL, the district’s content-management software, created by Washington-based Blackboard Inc., and all four schools in the district’s 1-to-1 program each employs a technology facilitator to aid that process. The district’s three elementary schools only began distributing laptops to its third graders this year.

Districts’ and schools’ organizational structures and long standing policies built around traditional seat-time metrics may be inhibiting their ability to move toward competency-based models. For example, bell schedules, grading policies, academic department structures, fixed sense of course scope and sequence, and familiarity with whole-group instruction may all be exerting the tug of status quo bias. As such, transforming districts and schools to competency-based systems is not a simply policy change: it’s a fundamental reconfiguration of teams and structures inside schools, that allows for students to progress at their own pace and demonstrate mastery in a variety of ways. In New Hampshire’s example, for those schools that have yet to move to fully competency-based systems, getting unstuck from the organizational structures and processes that guide them appears just as potent a barrier to innovation in some schools as the state’s policies are a gateway to innovation.

And it’s no surprise why. Change is hard—especially the kind of change I’m talking about here. It’s not about learning how to do PowerPoint; it’s about teaching students to use technology to teach themselves, to learn for themselves. In essence, it’s about teaching ourselves out of a job.

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