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At times it seems like researchers, PR flacks and reporters are playing a vast game of telephone. A researcher draws a conclusion, a PR flack inflates it and passes it off to a reporter, the reporter half understands it and then prints it, another PR flack half understands what the first reporter wrote and passes it on to another reporter, and so it goes.

I think the hapless writer who penned a Recent USA Today editorial on school reform was at the end of this chain. His first paragraph ends with this doozy: "Researchers agree that hiring good teachers, and ditching bad ones, is the best way to improve education." Hiring good teachers and losing bad ones is surely important, but is it "the best way" to improve schools? Is that really what "researchers agree?" Not really.

Here's the likely history behind USA Today's claim. A group of researchers finds that a "top quartile teacher" can raise a student's performance on tests much more dramatically than a bottom quartile teacher can. Give a low-performing student four top teachers in a row, they speculate, and the student will close the gap with high-performing peers. No more achievement gap! Other researchers note that the gains may actually fade after the first year, or that a "top quartile teacher" in year one may very well slip into a lower quartile the next year.

But that doesn't matter. A PR group takes the original research nugget and runs with it. They pop it into a set of talking points and hand those talking points to pundits like Brooks, Kristof and many others besides. Those pundits use the research nugget to push merit pay and reforms that focus on hiring and firing. Other PR people read their columns and pump out new talking points that portray bad teachers as the only things standing between poor students and success. And then our USA Today editorialist gets a hold of them and makes his grand claim about where "researchers agree."

Never mind that there is nothing close to a research consensus on the one "best way" to fix schools. Russ Whitehurst, who was once the nation's lead ed researcher, believes better curriculum may trump better hiring and firing policies as a school reform strategy. (See Matthew Levey's and Robert Pondiscio's excellent blog postings on Whitehurst's work.)

The people at the Consortium on Chicago School Research see teachers as one of five key factors that affect the fate of a struggling school: "school leadership, parent and community ties, professional capacity of the faculty, student-centered learning climate, and instructional guidance." They make a critical point that seldom sinks in with reporters who would sooner report on some Holy Grail of school reform: "Individual initiatives are unlikely to work in isolation."

And that's why pronouncements like the one in USA Today are so vexing. Yes, good teachers are critical. Of course they are. And, yes, we need to nurture the best and lose the worst. But there's just so much more to school reform than that.

It barely occurs to many pundits that we can make great teachers by nurturing their talents and improving their working conditions. They won't all spring fully formed from the heads of think tank theorists.

Facile pieces like the one in USA Today make it all too easy to let policy makers off the hook. It will take much more than a few hiring and firing policies to improve our schools.