Today’s New York Times editorial on high schools is really about teacher quality:
The federal Education Department failed to push the states toward doing better under the disastrous leadership of its departing secretary, Rod Paige. No matter how hard localities try, the best-designed high schools in the world will still fail unless the states and the federal government finally bite the bullet on teacher training. That means doing what it takes to remake the teacher corps, even if it means withholding federal dollars from diploma mills pretending to be colleges of education, forcing out unqualified teachers and changing the age-old practice of funneling the least-prepared teachers into the weakest schools.
That’s a double ouch (though not 100 percent fair since at the end of Paige’s tenure the Department was starting to get serious about enforcing No Child’s teacher quality provisions).