The only way to ensure this happens, Mathews advised, “is to create schools like New Tech that are organized by top-flight educators, people who have already mastered these lessons and know how to teach them and can thus hire the teachers they think will most readily be able to learn [the new approaches and] organize their lessons in this way.”

He added that the school has to give a “very well trained, expert educator of a principal the power to hire and fire, the power to figure out, along with his/her team of new teachers, what way will work best for their kids, and the power to change what they’re doing if it’s not working very well. Again, the charter school system, the pilot school system that we seem to be working towards, in which schools are run by the educators inside of those schools, and they don’t have to bow to whatever the district wants or whatever the latest fad is, that’s the way to go….