Sent to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 6
Educators are always interested in improving teacher evaluation, and Anne Faigen’s comments (“Evaluating teachers is not so easy,” August 5) are helpful. Her essay also, unfortunately, contributes to the impression that there is a crisis in teacher quality in the United States. Our international test scores are low, we are told, and the problem is bad teaching. Hence, we need better methods of evaluating teachers.
Our international test scores are unspectacular, but the reasons are not related to teacher quality (or parents or unions or schools of education): Middle class American students who attend well-funded schools rank at the top 
