What I believe sucks the life out of a school is a teacher that’s not engaged in the outcome of the students every day

— Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman responding to the complaint from Chicago AFT boss Karen Lewis that testing is “sucking” the life out of schools. Huberman gets a beer on us.

We agree that teacher quality is easily the most important school-based factor in the success of kids. . [but] where Ed chose to focus on educator qualifications, for us, those are secondary to actually looking at student achievement.

— David Lussier of the Austin (Texas) school district in response to a study by Ed Fuller of the University Council for Educational Administration on behalf of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, that poor students in the district are getting low-quality teachers. Lussier is right: Qualifications alone are not indicators of teacher quality and there is correlation between credentials and student performance. At the same time, Austin’s 67 percent graduation rate for its Class of 2009 (based on data from the U.S. Department of Education and the Texas Education Agency) shows that the district isn’t doing all it can on the teacher quality front.