Note: Look past the title. The point of this column (by a former Economics professor where I went to college) is very pro-teacher.
http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/contributors.asp?id=1897So why are we blaming teachers when manufacturing has shown us that management must get past blaming the workers to actually improve? This also raises questions about the efficacy of merit pay as the solution. If the problem is the system, then how will changing the reward structure be the solution? The fact that teachers are skeptical about the definition of merit makes this approach even more questionable.
Discussions point to effective teachers getting good results as evidence to criticize other teachers for poor student performance. This makes it easy to blame tenure and teacher unions for blocking improvement. This provides simple, but probably incorrect, answers to complex, systemic problems. Some good teaching happens in spite of system problems, but there is certainly not enough good teaching and learning now.