It seems everyone is down on bad teachers these days. But the truth is that simply removing the bad apples won't fix our education problems. After all, it's not as if there's a large pool of superstar teachers waiting to replace those who are weeded out. Our best hope to improve education broadly and deeply is to strengthen the programs that develop and prepare the vast majority of the nation's teachers.

Treating children that way is like giving a lion their food without making them hunt for it.

Jacinth Thomas-Val writes the sentence on the blackboard in her classroom at Sacramento City College, then asks her students what's wrong with it. "What does ‘them' refer to in this sentence?" she asks one young woman. The young woman doesn't know, shakes her head, then gets up and leaves the classroom without explanation, not returning for the rest of the period.

California has a massive dropout problem: An estimated 25 percent of students fail to complete high school, ultimately costing the state billions in lost income tax revenue, crime costs and public assistance.

Last month, a study from UC Santa Barbara suggested that the dropout problem might be more concentrated than previously thought: It found that just 20 percent of schools account for 80 percent of dropouts, and that many of them are "alternative" schools that are meant to help students who have not succeeded in regular schools.