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The  from last week’s  that  can  24 other states with flexibility from NCLB has centered on the New York Times’  and whether ESEA waivers represent A)  to states from an impossible task or B) an all-out retreat from school , particularly for disadvantaged and underserved students.

State education officials tend to go with option A) — like Tennessee DOE spokeswoman Kelli Gauthier: “There was a general feeling that there were these goals that no one was ever going to meet.” Unsurprisingly, national policy wonks that helped shape NCLB’s accountability system lean toward B). Former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings asked, “Are we saying all the schools are good except for 5 percent?”

But focusing on the merits of  (the numbers identified under Minnesota’s ESEA waiver in 2012 vs. NCLB in 2011) misses a larger issue. How can federal policymakers, state officials, and educators create an accountability system where 100 percent of schools are in improvement? Where improvement is seen as a positive label, rather than one of failure?

The waivers only go part of the way. States spend a significant portion of their  describing how they will identify and support ‘priority’ and ‘focus’ schools (roughly, the bottom 15 percent). However, states also address – albeit, in a much shorter section – how they will “ensure continuous improvement in other Title I schools that… are not making progress.” But all schools, whether the state awards them an ‘A’ or an ‘F’ and regardless of their Title I status, should be engaged in continuous improvement efforts. While this process is certainly dependent on school culture and an effective team of school leaders, I am also certain continuous improvement can be encouraged – or discouraged – by policy.

Sure, the bottom 5, or 15, or 25 percent of schools – chronically low performers – will need more direct assistance and support from the state and district. It  to focus time and resources there. But school accountability systems can also encourage and enable the remaining schools to improve. Most often, states look to more transparent school performance data, like school report cards, as the primary improvement mechanism for these schools. Transparency is well and good, but could states and districts do more?

While school improvement is clearly a  , here are three ideas states and districts could explore to help shift the emphasis from the evaluation side of accountability to the improvement side:

1) Improve the quality and accessibility of student-level data available to educators and provide more pre-service and in-service training to educators in how to use it. More (and better) data is necessary for school improvement, but it will be insufficient if the data  for educators. The  is one example of this kind of effort which could be scaled up.

2) Consider piloting school inspections as a central component of accountability and improvement efforts. Just like classroom observations are becoming an essential part of teacher evaluation systems, school observations and reports by  could be used as the basis for improvement. Inspections could add valuable  to the quantitative data states and districts have collected and serve as a starting point for school improvement plans.

3) Ensure that new systems to evaluate and improve teachers and leaders are linked to overall school improvement. Currently, school accountability and teacher accountability are disparate systems, with  beat down by both. As states implement new ways of measuring educator effectiveness in their waivers, these evaluations – and importantly the feedback and professional development linked to them – could be incorporated into school improvement so that the two work together.  has included the percentage of effective teachers at a school in its new, waiver-approved accountability system. While this is a start, schools could also use results from individual teacher and leader evaluations to identify common human capital needs at the school-level and ensure that these capacity issues are addressed in school improvement plans.

This post appeared originally on  blog.