My point is that if we’ve done everything we can to improve teacher pay and teacher performance and training and development, some people just aren’t meant to be teachers, just like some people aren’t meant to be carpenters, some people aren’t meant to be nurses. At some point, they’ve got to find a new career.

President Obama at a White House news conference, in response to a question from a Philadelphia schoolteacher about what makes an “effective teacher.” (Courtesy of The Washington Post, which adds parenthetically, “he [President Obama] could not get the teacher to answer when he asked whether in her 15 years on the job she has encountered colleagues who she would not want to teach her own children.”)