>"With a direct relationship between teacher quality and student achievement, the fact that our teacher pool is shrinking will surely undermine other attempts, policy-wise or grassroots, to realize positive reform in education. No amount of money or measures of accountability can counter the harmful effects of teaching position vacancies."

Exactly. This happened to me. I was teaching in an inner city school when myself and 491 other teachers were removed from our classrooms and shuffled around because tax revenues were down last year because the economy sucked. I was left out of the shuffle because I didn't have the seniority to get reassigned.

I want to put forth my idea of "teacher quality" to give people an idea about what I think should be discussed:

"Quality" teachers create an environment in which students feel safe and supported in their learning. Experienced teachers who have tried and failed many times learn how to create and maintain this supportive environment. "Teacher quality" isn't about academic achievement or intellectual capacity of teachers, it's about their ability to set up an environment for students to learn and then guide and challenge students to grow.

I'm saying that increasing the average IQ or SAT/ACT scores of teachers won't make schools better unless those new teachers have the strategies and emotional strength it takes to sustain a learning environment for students.

The program I went through did a horrible job of training us how to create a learning environment. The sentiment was "Oh, it's different for everyone, you'll figure it out." That's a wildly ignorant strategy for implementing the most important part of a classroom.