Value of a good teacher

I read this extremely discouraging article about How to Build a Better Teacher today and was struck, again, by what seems like a commonsense difference between what education reform is trying to do and what we actually need. The focus is on teaching tips about who can make kids perform better on measures rather than looking systemically at why kids think school learning isn't worth doing. The failure of education is about kids being unpersuaded that work in school is worth doing. Someone who can fix *that* will actually transform a kid's outlook about learning for the rest of their life. Someone who uses teaching tips and tricks to get kids to pay attention to the teacher or pass a test has not done anyone any favors. We need students to become self-motivated learners and to develop their own self-regulatory strategies. Nothing in this article shows that anyone is thinking about that at all.