Makes sense to me

It should be obvious that, in the final analysis, the quality of our education system is a function of how good our teachers are. It's clear that in education as in any other endeavor some people are better than others. However, because of many reasons few school districts collect the data needed to really evaluate teacher performance. As we know, once a teacher is granted tenure, it is much more difficult to make performance-related decisions.

There is a study by The Hamilton Project that tries to lay out a method for improving the teaching effectiveness of our schools. You'll find a summary here.

The method proposed is based mainly on an extensive study of the LA schools and is predicated on the idea that with a good teacher students learn better and learn more. It's fairly straightforward but, very likely, will be difficult to implement. The authors make five recommendations:

1. Reduce the barriers (such as certification) to becoming a teacher
2. Make it harder to tenure the least effective teachers
3. Give bonuses to highly effective teachers willing to teach in disadvantaged schools
4. Establish systems to measure teachers' job performance
5. Track student performance and teacher effectiveness over time.