It's Motivation ... really?

It's motivation, but eveyone wants you to believe that teacher quality is the panacea to huge educational gains. Why does the Department of Education choose to ignore evidence, studies, and data that indicate that teachers contribute to 5-20% of a student's educational output? Maybe because the Gates Foundation claims and is spending lots of money on research trying to prove teacher quality predominantly determines student educational outcome. Please help me here ... even the upper limit of 20% is not a predominant factor. I think this is gross ignorance. Maybe we should focus on some of the real causes of poor student output, like poverty, hunger, no parents, homeless, depressed neighborhood, no jobs, .... Maybe I should not have said "causes" but there is a strong correlation between student outcome and poverty, hunger, and poor role models. I wonder why the government does not want to tackle that BIG problem? ... [more]

These 3 videos of Dr. Diane Ravitch at 2011 AASA National Conference on Education are great:
Part 1 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvstR3Bkh4c
Part 2 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=p52Ygnt7B_E
Part 3 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=siRN0WNSqao