The panelists offered countless nuggets during the March 24^th event.  There were points of agreement as well as points of healthy debate. The ten “nuggets” below emerged as significant common threads.

We must create, support, and sustain:

• an education system which honors and cultivates strengths, passions and creativity (of students as well as teachers and reflected in legislation and policy.
   

• an educational landscape free of fears and quotas.
   

• liberty for and practices of the customization of teaching and learning.
   

• efforts to professionalize the teaching profession by recruiting, developing and retaining the best and the brightest professionals.
   

• rich environments designed to expand social, emotional and intellectual abilities to prepare students for the test of life - not a life of tests.
   

• humane programs and sufficient funding from prenatal care to beyond the twelfth grade.
   

• education that is viewed as a body of work capable of shaping communities and the future.
   

• assessments designed to assess what we value.
   

• “research schools” which serve as new vehicles for education and in which new research (especially on the brain) is field tested.
   

• the updating of existing out-moded and hierarchical Program of Studies.