My mother was for many years an elementary school teacher in a district that was almost entirely Hispanic, where a large percentage of the students could barely speak English and where many were the children of migrant farm workers who never stayed in one school for the entire year.

When NCLB hit, her school was unsurprisingly deemed "failing." The response was to focus exclusively on test scores, eliminating any program (art, sports, music) that did not directly traslate into better performance on the benchmark test. And yet, because the students still couldn't speak English, nothing much changed and the school was taken over by the state, which meant the principal and many of the teachers were fired.

How does this sort of thing make any sense? How are the teachers to blame for their unprepared students? These teachers are working in the hardest districts with the most students of greatest need, and our national response is to punish them.

It's distressing to see in many of these discussions exactly the attitudes described in the article: teachers are lazy, they're overpaid, they even get summers off! Never mind that their salaries are so low that many need to find alternate work for the summer to make ends meet, or that it is impossible to get all the work done during the school day, necessitating often long nights.

There are bad teachers, just as there are bad programmers and bad doctors. We should try to help them become better teachers, and fire them if that's not possible. But we shouldn't castigate an entire profession as a result, and we should acknowledge that if we actually wanted good teachers, we will have to pay for it.