In light of the two conferences--Managing for Performance and the Mission-Driven Management Summit-- Ascendant held last week and the discussions around performance management in our education systems as well as the nonprofit and government sectors, I was surprised to read an article about new steps New York State is taking in today's Wall Street Journal, "State to Target Cheating by Teachers."

According to the article, "the day after state lawmakers approved a measure under which student scores on state tests will count for up to 40% of teachers' annual evaluations," they created "an investigative unit to combat cheating by aiding local districts and probing the most egregious cases."

Yesterday, The Atlantic posted an article on "How School Choice Became an Explosive Issue." Like almost everything else in American K12 education now, school choice has been politicized -- to the detriment of children and educators across the country.

Take, for example, the issue of charter schools. Charter management organizations like KIPP and Uncommon have proven that they can indeed scale the achievements of charter schools by instituting higher standards across their networks. Yet detractors of charter schools on the left accuse them of creating educational apartheid.

And then there's the issue of public schools and teachers's unions. Listen to the rhetoric from the right and it sounds like teacher's unions are committed to only protecting their civil service jobs, and that teachers don't care about students or achievement. Which is obviously untrue and overstates the case.

Of course, the answer is somewhere in the middle. What we need in the United States is a market for education that includes a strong, accountable, and equitable public education system and and equally robust private system. And we need to get past the rhetoric and the grandstanding to learn from all the experiments going on in the United States. Our children deserve better.

In a recent article in the Atlantic, Anu Partanen made a compelling case about What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success. In the article, he makes the case that the key to Finland's success is that the country values equality more than excellence.

I heard some disconcerting news last week from the field of education. According to a report by the National Association of Gifted Children (NAGC), most states lack the critical infrastructure necessary to ably identify and teach our high-ability and high-potential students.

The Wall Street Journal in a Nov. 12 article framed the story by stating that "[a] national focus on the lowest-achieving students has helped boost their academic performance, but it has left the country's brightest young minds behind, prompting calls to rethink how schools teach top kids."

A recent survey by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic found that America's teachers are open to the idea of being held accountable for their students' progress through multiple measures. Bill and Melinda Gates describe those findings and the work their foundation is doing to help teachers improve their craft in an article in the Saturday, October 22, Wall Street Journal.

They make some great points about the difficulty in developing measures of the profession, or "craft" of teaching. "We have all known terrific teachers," the Gates' write. "You watch them at work for 10 minutes and you can tell how thoroughly they've mastered the craft. But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding."

Over the past few years at Ascendant, while we have worked with education organizations such as the Rochester (NY), Atlanta, Ossining (NY), and Alexandria (VA) public school systems; the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education (PEJE); and the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), the performance measurement conversation inevitably turns to how best to measure student progress.

The common solutions tossed about include sticking to the traditional grading system, focusing on standardized test scores, tracking graduation rates or even following up with students several years after their cohort graduates to see what they are doing. One new suggestion I hadn't heard until I read about it in the September 18, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine is to measure them on character because, as Paul Tough says in his article "The Character Test," character may have as much to do with our children's success as grades.

Why haven't we found the silver bullet that will magically, like Jaime Escalante in "Stand and Deliver," come and save our struggling schools? The answer, quite simply, is because there isn't one. While sound bites make good press, they make really bad education policy. What works in McLean, VA may not work in Anacostia, MD. And what works in Pittsford, NY, may not work in Rochester, NY. Real education reform needs to start with management reform. And here's how I propose we do it.

So the cover story of the Fall 2011 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review is called "The Missing Link in School Reform." At Ascendant, we help a lot of schools to improve performance, so the article caught my eye. In the article, author Carrie Leana introduces the concept of Social Capital. She says that it may be more important than Human Capital in improving schools.

City Newspaper in Rochester, New York, recently published an article about their soon-to-be-ex superintendent, Jean-Claude Brizard. As a native of Rochester, and someone who has had the privilege of working with Jean-Claude in the Rochester City School District, I wanted to highlight this article. I think it does an excellent job of laying out some of the challenges facing urban districts -- and urban superintendents -- today.

Dave Eggers had an op-ed in the New York Times this weekend entitled The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries. In it, he argues effectively for paying teachers more. And in theory, I agree. Why wouldn't we pay teachers more for doing a job that is critical to the future of our country? Aren't our children worth it?