answer:One of the biggest concerns is whether teachers are receiving adequate training and becoming adequately qualified and it’s a very honest question. However, here’s the big catch: they are being measured for quality by people who have never spent a day in the classroom and do not understand the challenges facing teachers. There’s no strong consensus on what makes a Great Teacher. Paperwork management? Ability to teach to the test? Ability to identify a child’s learning blocks and maximize their independent learning skills? Ability to manage 5 different ability levels of need in one classroom with no time or a budget? Ability to make kids want to learn when they came in on an empty stomach, with 3 hours of sleep and are worrying about drunk parents? Or ability to appear competent by giving insane amounts of empty work? Or ability to pretend that their stoned or drunk students are actually interested in the fundamentals of Greek and Latin roots? Or ability to understand what really happens in 30 children’s minds and adapt over 500 times a day to meet that? Most people agree on what the results of quality education looks like, but nobody really agrees on how to get to that result. How does quality education really happen? How much of it is from the schools and how much is it from family or personal values? How is it that excellent students come from terrible schools and terrible students come from excellent schools? Or for that matter, what really makes an excellent school? Nobody really has the answer, but nobody wants to admit it to the public. When my son was in 5th grade- he went to a “top 5-star award winning” school. He was belittled, abused and humiliated daily by his teacher. My son lost his confidence and was scarred for a long time. But the school was award winning—lots of rich families sent their kids there and they pooh-poohed me off. I transferred him mid-year to a “failing” school where his new teacher was the most amazing guy teaching reading to a class of 25 Latino students and stayed 4 hours after school everyday to meet their crazy-diverse needs. But his school was “terrible?” Not at all!! It was a wonderful school but because of the demography and challenges, they were “failing.” That’s what the politicians have put on the American people. Then… Hollywood sells us Freedom Writers/Lean On Me/Stand and Deliver/Mr. Holland’s type of Super-Teachers. I love these movies—but they do misguide the public about what a teacher is realistically able to do in the very little amount of time with the little resources they’re allotted. Then you throw in a connotation-laden law like “No Child Left Behind”—aww… who wants to disagree with that and admit some kids do and will get left behind for many reasons? Did you know that the NCLB law is meant to eliminate the lowest performing scores, but does nothing for the high performers. All the money was taken from high performers and given to low performers. If the high performers no longer perform so high… the lowest common denominator won’t look so bad after all, umm? Politicians and government officials want to appease voters (both who know next to nothing about the system), organizations want to sell their tests and controlled-lab-results. Private corporates like ETS control the nation’s testing standards and get craploads of money (ACT, GRE, LSAT, etc). Politicians and self-appointed “leaders in education” try to sell the public their next big solution. The ” ” is there because the NCLB was created by a speech therapist who was a phonics-education advocate; she wasn’t an education researcher. Many “leaders” are not cognizant researchers, but teacher-politicians. But…. remember it’s the teacher’s fault if the kids don’t succeed. They’re horribly lazy, stupid, bad people, haven’t you heard? Disembarking from soapbox. Thank you for listening!