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Problem. second, those countries that educate those teachers much, much more in content knowledge and classroom practice than we do, and they have a much more professional view of their role. second thing to do is give everybody choices. one of the things we did, we talk a lot about in new york, is we opened up some 600 new schools of choice under mayor bloomberg. you know, everybody we know, every middle class person insists on a choice. why not give it to all the kids and set up a much more competitive system? the third thing, which you focus on and many of your programs, is the intelligent ...

If they can't get better, they have to be removed from the system. if you create an environment like that, everybody's performance is going to improve. >> impact took effect in 2009. you left a year later. your successor continues the program. can you explain how the system works? >> sure. first it's important to sort of juxtapose that against what has happened in this country for decades, which is most teachers didn't have rigorous teacher evaluation systems. you know, yours principal would come in once a year maybe. they'd watch you teach and then they'd write something up that didn't really...

Legislative change in activity in states across the country than we've ever seen before in this kind of period of time. and i think all of the states now are having important conversations about things like how do we more effectively evaluate our teachers. so i think it has absolutely been money well spent. >> critics do say the obama approach overemphasizes testing and crowds out arts and other subjects. what do you think about that? >> i think that's absolutely incorrect. you know, it's very clear that what the administration is saying is that when teachers are evaluated, they should be eval...

Reformers" on the other side. but no one is listening to the voice of the teachers in the middle, the ones who are working on the front lines, the ones who are in the classrooms every day and the ones who really understand how policy would translate into classroom practice. >> uh-huh. what will you do with this funding from bill gates? >> we want to make sure we are representing the voices of as many teachers as possible. growing the organization and making sure that we're really elevating the voices of real classroom teachers in this policy discussion. >> interesting having this discussion wi...

Most but a debate about how you measure quality and the testing. i want to read you something from a report, the research arm of the michigan education association which to be clear is the teachers union but they say u.s. states with high academic standards fare no better or worse than those identified as having low standards. research support for standards driven test based accountability systems is similarly weak and nations with centralized standards generally tend to perform no better or worse on international tests than those without. essentially they're challenging this idea that the whi...