I just finished a really interesting conference.  The National Association for Alternative Certification.  Full disclosure: I am actually president of the conference, but Vickie (the VP) and I go by the rule that we create conferences that we really want to attend.  Pedro Noguera was opening keynote. Annette Breaux finished out the conference.  What I really enjoyed was that there seemed to be three overarching themes

1) Students need and deserve great teachers
2) Student Learning (not only test scores) need to be the center
3) We need to figure out a way to find trust again in the education profession

That last one is the hardest to implement.  It seems like no one trusts anyone in education.  Current systems seem based on mistrust.  Change is needed but change without trust, that doesn't bode well for us.

IIRTW  (if I ruled the world)

We would schools based on mastery learning and teachers would be responsible for teaching certain standards to a mastery level and not teaching grades.  Thus a second grader might switch teachers in December if he mastered the content that his previous teacher was teaching.

We would still have tests  and we could even have value-added, but they would be formative in nature and they would show how well the students did pre/post on the content for which they were responsible.  So parts of that advanced second graders scores would count for more than one teacher.  The tests would also show were a child was weak so that we could 1) get him to relearn previous skills  or 2) understand that perhaps they need to be accelerated.  The tests would not be punitive. We see how teachers' students did and those teachers that did not do well according to the formula, we would see why.  This way we could point out elements that the teacher is good at teaching and elements where she (or he) might need to work.  Also, there were be no managing and sequencing of instruction by people who are outside of the classroom.  As sequence would be available for struggling teachers, but the teachers would not be micromanaged, told how and when to teach and then have to suffer for test scores for a class that they were not in charge of.   In fact, administrators would have to observe, remediate and get professional growth plans for all the teachers that are struggling before they even set foot in the other teachers classes.  Teacher turnover would become one of the areas on which administrators were evaluated.  So
Evaluation for administrators:
-teachers who showed growth under their administration
-highly effective teachers who stay
-Student  and parent evaluations of principal
-Teacher and staff evaluations of principal
-Number of students who grew a year in the year they were at the school

Evaluation for teachers
-Student/parent evaluation
-peer evaluation
-principal evaluation (more for 1st year or struggling teachers)
-students who mastered all of the standards that teacher was hired to teach when she was teaching them