What a lot of nonsense from the unions. What reformers are advocating for isn't teacher bashing, but teacher CELEBRATING! Everyone agrees that teacher quality is the single most important variable in student learning, so it logically follows that teachers should be celebrated and rewarded when students do well – but the inverse is also true. It is an INSULT to teachers to treat them like interchangeable widgets, as the unions do. They are not longshoremen, but professionals. Does anyone think all doctors or lawyers have the same skill level, and shouldn't be evaluated and promoted and compensated differently based on how skilled they are and how hard they work???

This is complete BS: "how do you look in the face of a PE teacher, a history teacher or a cafeteria worker and say: The reason you don't have a job is because our fourth graders, compared to last year's fourth graders, didn't do well on a math and reading test?" The real quote should be: "I look at certain teachers and say: The reason you don't have a job is because year after year, the children in your classroom haven't learned anything at all."

SANCHEZ: Dennis Van Roekel is president of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. He says he's astonished by the hostility towards teachers, and the administration's reluctance to denounce it.

Mr. VAN ROEKEL: I would hate to see this administration labeled as anti-teacher.

SANCHEZ: Van Roekel says teachers are taking the brunt of the most aggressive efforts to turn around failing schools, not just shutting them down or firing principals and teachers, but attacking hard-earned benefits like tenure and seniority.

Van Roekel says the Obama administration's Race to the Top fund is even offering states and local school districts billions of dollars to tie teacher evaluations to students' test scores. An example of how this unprecedented level of scrutiny from Washington is affecting teachers, says Van Roekel, is Guilford County, North Carolina.

A school board there is asking the U.S. Education Department for $2 million to help pay for a complete overhaul of 10 schools. And yes, teachers in at least one school will be dismissed, says Mo Green, the county school superintendent.

Mr. MO GREEN (School Superintendent, Guilford County, North Carolina): Dismissal is maybe too strong a word. It certainly would require that the faculty would have to no longer be at the school. Because if you -obviously, if you close the school then there would not be any faculty at that school.

SANCHEZ: By the way, what would you say to anyone who would say: What they're doing down in Guilford County is nothing more than teacher bashing?

Mr. GREEN: This is not teacher bashing at all. This is what amounts to a fresh start.

SANCHEZ: Teachers in Guilford County say they're demoralized, for a good reason, says Van Roekel.

Mr. VAN ROEKEL: You ignore your own policies of due process, you ignore the rights of employees. I mean, how do you look in the face of a PE teacher, a history teacher or a cafeteria worker and say: The reason you don't have a job is because our fourth graders, compared to last year's fourth graders, didn't do well on a math and reading test?

SANCHEZ: So, if schools are failing and kids aren't learning, the question remains: Do teachers and their unions deserve more of the blame than -let's say, shrinking education budgets, poverty or bad parenting? Maybe not, says Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, but teachers are easy targets.

Mr. RICK HESS (American Enterprise Institute): If the unions in the past 25 years had been more aggressive partners in trying to police their own ranks, in trying to work with reform-minded superintendents, we would be at a very different conversation today.

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