Paul E. Peterson: The Public Turns Against Teacher Tenure – WSJ.
Article worth reading, again focusing on the importance of teacher quality.
You can’t have good schools without good teachers, but improving the lowest-performing segment of teachers would go a long way. Good teachers are so important to student learning that if roughly the lowest performing 5% of all teachers were replaced with merely average teachers, Stanford economist Eric Hanushek estimates that it would increase the annual growth rate of the U.S. by 1% of GDP. Student performance in the U.S. would also catch up with that in Canada, Finland, Germany and other high-performing countries.