Can "Good" Teachers Solve Our Education Problems?

The always interesting Malcolm Gladwell makes a compelling case in this week's New Yorker that the best solution to the problems in our public education system would be devoting resources to finding and retaining good teachers. He argues that it's difficult to predict if a person will be a good, average, or bad teacher, just as it's nearly impossible to predict whether a good college quarterback will make an excellent NFL signal-caller. Therefore, the best approach is to try out a very large number of teachers, establish accountability standards that make sense, and keep the teachers who turn out to be effective.

I suppose this means that Gladwell comes down on the side of the "reformers" in the ongoing education debate. The reformers, like Gladwell, tend to be empiricists inclined to rely on statistics in making their decisions. I'm sympathetic to the reformers' argument, but "good" teachers can't solve all of the public schools' problems. Funding and class size, not to mention the legion of socioeconomic problems that can short-circuit the learning process, do matter. The best teachers may be able to thrive under any conditions, and that's fantastic, but if you improve working (or learning) conditions just marginally, it seems obvious that more teachers will be able to succeed.