Teachers were never the problem. Poverty is the problem impacting students.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/15849/teachers_were_never_the_problem

a little-noticed study released last week provides yet more confirmation that neither the “education crisis” meme or the “evil teachers' union” narrative is accurate.  
Before looking at that study, consider some of the ways we already know that the dominant storyline about education is, indeed, baseless propaganda.
As I've reported before, we know that American public school students from wealthy districts generate some of the best test scores in the world. This proves that the education system's problems are not universal–the crisis is isolated primarily in the parts of the system that operate in high poverty areas. It also proves that while the structure of the traditional public school system is hardly perfect, it is not the big problem in America’s K-12 education system. If it was the problem, then traditional public schools in rich neighborhoods would not perform as well as they do.
Similarly, we know that many of the high-performing public schools in America's wealthy locales are unionized. We also know that one of the best school systems in the world—Finland's—is fully unionized. These facts prove that teachers' unions are not the root cause of the education problem, either. After all, if unions were the problem, then unionized public schools in wealthy areas and Finland would be failing.
So what is the problem? That brings us to the new study from the Southern Education Foundation. Cross-referencing and education data, researchers found that that a majority of all public school students in one third of America's states now come from low-income families.