In her February 7, 2016 The Truth About Wasting Time at Work article for www.forbes.com Liz Ryan writes:

We need to lose our “Production First” mindset in order to thrive in the 21st century. We are sixteen years in. It is time to wake up and see what really differentiates so-so organizations from outstanding ones. In the great organizations, we assume that the people we’ve hired are capable of doing their jobs on their own, and much better than we could ever do them.

 Yes! We need to realize that we are 16 years into the twenty-first century and those people, who have jobs that are not scrutinized by a time-stamp on everything they do are typically more happy and more productive than those who don't. The same argument can be made when moving away from a Carnegie unit for students.

For the last century, schools have been given the responsibility of filling in for parents while they work and it has been expected that school is the "job" of young people between the ages of 5 and 18. However, as employers become more flexible and allow more work-from-home opportunities and begin to pay by the task, not the hour, are schools able to adapt?

With the re-authorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act, perhaps we can move away from outdated accountability of making sure students have 60 hours of "seat time," and move to measuring growth. I see this as not only as differentiating the so-so employers from the outstanding ones, but also showing the difference between the so-so schools and the outstanding ones.