Suggesting that great schooling is all about teachers is like suggesting that great restaurants are all about waiters. If the food is lousy, the service doesn’t matter. And make no mistake, the food is lousy. We continue to put thin, tasteless gruel on the menu, and blame the waiters when the customers leave hungry.

I must be not very bright, because I still can’t get my head around how we can create measures of teacher effectiveness without agreeing on what they’re supposed to teach first.

Robert Pondiscio at CoreKnowledge blog.