Taxpayers and students lose another one

Once again, the powerful special interests have killed education reform, with the help of the Lame Stream Media.
As a result, we can expect to continue seeing half the students who leave the public schools after 13 years being unable to read and write well enough to go to college.
This is a "profession"? If half their patients died, would doctors be "professionals"?
As they did in the 1980s, when another attempt to reward good teachers was enacted, then repealed, the teacher unions argued, in essence, that there is no way to measure what a teacher does.
You can't go by test scores, they said, because some students don't want to learn.
The previous system used a measuring device devised and tested by a professor at the University of Florida. They said that didn't work either.
If you ask any teacher who the good teachers at his school are, he can tell you.
How does he know?
If we can't measure a teacher's performance, how do we know they do anything?
If it is the student's fault, how do they explain the good results in private and parochial schools?
We have to assume by the aggregate results that public schoolteachers are only doing half the job. Maybe the answer is to cut their pay in half -- for good and bad teachers, since we can't tell the difference.