What's more important?

Whether a 6th grade math teacher can hang her state licenses and certifications on her wall indicating she took all the right classes in education school?

Or whether she can take a group of kids entering her classroom in September who are two years behind grade level and teach them two years' worth of math by June?

The answer is obvious. Unfortunately, school regulations in New Jersey and the state's charter authorizer pick the licenses and certifications over teacher effectiveness and in most cases ignore the end result.

We're working on changing that. The New Jersey Charter Schools Association is part of a national movement to create quality standards for charter schools that are based on the "outputs" -- rather than solely the "inputs."

The Association is urging the state to adopt a policy whereby a charter school signs a contract with the state's authorizer, the Department of Education, which spells out the expected outcomes of a given school. The contract would be the guarantee that a school must produce great results for kids or face being shut down. That's true accountability.

For now, though, the state prescribes a series of inputs that have very little to do with the final result. They measure:

Yet none of these guarantee great results. All that the state is really measuring is compliance, not taking into account that a school can be compliant in every one of these areas and yet still fail miserably to provide a sound education with high achievement for kids.

We say let's do the opposite. Measure and evaluate the outcomes the school said it promised it would deliver for kids. If it's not doing so, then hold the school accountable for the failure to make good on that promise.

And the outcomes have to be more than just the state tests, which are static, one-time snapshots that tell us very little about student growth or a school's ability to take underperforming kids and help them achieve at high levels. The state tests certainly don't measure life and college-readiness.

This important issue of quality is another place where charter schools can lead and help other public schools as well. Charter schools are known as a place for innovation and high-performance, brought about by the autonomy and freedoms provided by the charter law.

Through our work developing quality standards, we can help all of New Jersey's schools -- not just charter schools -- develop the right goals so that we turn our focus to student achievement rather than compliance issues that have nothing to do with student success.