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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.

No one suggests using value-added analysis as the sole measure of a teacher. Many experts recommend that it count for half or less of a teacher's overall evaluation.

“This is [about an entire] environment; you can’t say it’s [only] about technology,” Allen said of the city’s efforts. “When you merge good teaching and good curriculum using i21 tools as the platform, then things really start to happen.” She added that the project requires all of these elements working together in order to succeed: “It is [about] all of the above in changing the environment, and how we do things, and how we think differently.”