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No Child Left Behind (NCLB,) an initiative introduced by both Republicans and Democrats, represented by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, has raised a panicked stampede of emotions from educators that is just delightful to see. I remember substitute teaching in the day when teachers used to drag themselves into school, half-zonked from partying the night before, slouch in their seats and throw out some make-work for any student who wanted it. You’d walk down a hallway of just about any school in an un-wealthy area of the city, and you’d see very little going on in just about any classroom door glass you’d choose to glance through. Lucky for the Board of Ed, schools were off-limits to the public and to any cameras, so this fact was never easily related in the media.

Still, the teacher-authored book about pathetically poor teaching environments was so common it was a veritable genre, though always ending up with the teacher-hero succeeding in reaching and transforming the students—something that just never occurred in real life, but, thanks to those books and movies, there were plenty of idealistic young teachers who banged their heads against the wall for a year or two before moving on to other careers. That was me.

In those days, principals could spend very little time at work, teachers transformed playgrounds into parking lots for their cars to make the suburban commute, and very few people gave a rat’s ass what any of the kids were doing with their lives.

There was already much psychological research that indicated the keys to transformative teaching: group work, personally-relevant projects, enthusiasm, high standards, reinforcement (rewarding kids with praise for doing good work,) and accurate assessments of what a child can do so as to challenge with realistic goals. Still, few attempted to use these time and energy-consuming tools to change the march of failure, and, to be fair, a single teacher can do little. You need school-wide change, as students are not going to spend all the rest of their classes goofing off and transform to studious just for your class.

Every school had a few older teachers who dragged their feet and complained in moaned tones, read the newspaper at their desks, and treated the students like, perhaps, a friendly prison guard would his inmates. Other teachers would just run through a routine, making no effort to raise enthusiasm in themselves, let alone their students.

No teachers would fight, which was what you had to do just to set the stage for an attempt at real teaching. It would emotionally destroy you.

After all, there was no discipline. Do you have any idea what it takes to motivate a class without discipline? I will tell you: you must perform. You must compete for attention with distractions and win. Your lesson must be more entertaining than the new electronic device in this student’s purse or the story of a new boyfriend that student is about to tell the one sitting behind her.

It wasn’t just the rotten teachers, (which were I’d say a greater percentage than most educators are willing to admit,) but it was the rotten principals, and the rotten administrators, all the way up to the rotten federal policies.

NCLB promised to change it all and do so rapidly, as if another generation could not be spared.

And in many ways it has. For the first time, US educators are being pressed to perform. The churning changes bubbling up all through the system, even if they are not successful, are creating an environment where at least the status quo will not be tolerated. Compared to the warehouses I worked at in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Anything is an improvement. You hear all these educators caterwauling about being forced to “teach to the test,” but it is a great, great improvement from not having to teach at all.

This is not to say the argument has no place. I am talking pretty strictly about poorly-performing schools. I have no idea why a school that performs well should need to administer more than one standardized test a year. But the schools that don’t cut it should be dragged out into the light of day and castigated, which cannot be accomplished without testing.

Mayor Bloomberg wants to chop these rotten schools up and turn them into charter schools. I do not approve of Bloomburg’s media-sponsored reign, and this can be seen as just another power grab for control by him, but, aware of the actual nature of a poorly-functioning school, I am confident that any fair-minded person who truly cares about the kids would decide that anything—ANYTHING—is preferable to allowing that school to drag on despite the fact that it is failing to improve on standardized tests it cannot even get a passing grade on.

Good teachers are key to achieving success.

We don’t have to acknowledge that, I realize. The easy way out is to say the truth: that parents are neglecting the kids. They too often send us poorly-behaved, spoiled, foul-mouthed know-it-alls who have an attention span no longer than the space between sit-com commercial breaks–who went to bed at midnight last night and ran out of the house this morning after ingesting a donut and a Coke. We cannot be expected to reach them.

This is too easy because it leads to nothing constructive. With a minimum wage of $7 in your nation, you cannot expect parents–who are only adult versions of their uneducated, poorly-nurtured children, after all–to have enough time free of work to parent the kids properly. Sure, you can appeal to them, but a good teacher must be prepared to teach kids who are poorly nurtured.

Otherwise, spare us, and just drag your dead-weight to another career.

And once you accept that good teachers are key to achieving success, it is clear that some very, very special people are needed. A good teacher is not only a true expert in their subject area but good at communicating with inner-city kids and highly intelligent… and emotionally intuitive… and sincere.

Though many teachers are kind that does not stop them from being dull-witted. They may be intelligent, but selfish. They may be friendly, but foolish. Immensely knowledgeable, but easily exhausted.

Teachers need to be experts, communicators, intelligent, intuitive, sincere, kind, clever, generous, friendly, and they need an abundance of energy and enthusiasm. Think about it. Turn one of these assets to its inverse and you have a fatal flaw in teaching. Just one. A stupid teacher is worthless to a school. A selfish person, a dishonest person, a person who is emotionally needy or frigid. People with flaws like these are all around us, thriving. Teaching is one of the only careers where the professional cannot lack in one area. It just won’t work.

Say their only problem is they need affection and are not selfless enough to keep from seeking it from students in exchange for, say, homework—or say their only problem is their parents never pulled them away from the TV, so they don’t enjoy reading and writing, which was not a big problem on their way through college and even grad school, because, as my teacher at Lehman recently confided to the class: “This is grad school. Everybody gets an A.” (The same teacher who openly brags about falsifying NCLB assessment tests at the high school where she works.)

Good teaching requires you have it all. Everyone else is a hack, and really none of them should be teachers. Teachers like to say a few bad students can ruin a class, but a few bad teachers can ruin a school’s generation of kids. That’s a fact. The good news is people who are so well roundedly virtuous are often naturally drawn to this low-paying profession. The bad news is we have no way of weeding out the worst teachers. Teaching is so complicated an art that assessment is impossible, (though NCLB has panicked teachers into thinking they’re going to soon find a way.) So we must run a system with hacks.

And this has brought us to a strange place. An interesting place. So interesting, that I recently decided to return to the classroom, which is why I’m now pursuing my masters in Education. I am hopeful that in such an environment of change I can make a difference that I found such a futile pursuit years ago when absolutely nothing was going on in the NYC school system.