ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts of key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores the courage to which Duncan refers pertains to transparency, the exposure of weakness, and the admission of flaws. The formulation obviously takes for granted that, in the absence of the resources available thanks to the use of student achievement data, the conceptual content of high-quality teaching and learning has been opaque or unclear: achievement data promises transparency, then, through securing certainty as to what good teaching really means and creating a metric against which to compare instances of teaching and teachers. Now that the use of student achievement data enables certainty in this regard, the only remaining barrier to rectifying the flawed evaluation systems of the past is whether we have the courage, the courage, that is, to find ourselves and our education system flawed, to have our flaws named and our weaknesses revealed.
