Mike, I've been ranting about this for a long time, and at last, I believe I've found a teacher that will listen.

Obviously, there are plenty of good reasons to become a teacher - I used to be an "educational entertainer" and thoroughly enjoyed taking part in inspiring children to learn. However, as Ken Robinson says in his TED talk, (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html) and as you have pointed out here, the system is broken.

Even the NAPLAN system which is there to add transparency to the situation caused a great backlash from the teaching institution because of the fear of this transparency, and what it would mean to the scrutiny of their jobs. In many respects, I agree with the teachers on this, despite my passion for open data, because of the methodology used for doing comparison and benchmarking with NAPLAN (although it is a good start).

The main reason I sympathise with teachers on this is that there is increased scrutiny, little feedback, and no upside. If we are going to go to all of the effort of measuring the performance of our students (and in the process the performance of our teachers) then they should be rewarded according to that performance.

I've said this for a long time and heard the groans that there is no really valid way of doing this measurement because there are so many other factors that could influence the outcome of a students education. However, there is a methodology and it is outlined exceptionally well here 

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,258862,full.story 

If we used standardised testing to measure teachers, and rewarded them for the respective change that they made in their students education then quite possibly we would find ourselves in a situation where outcomes were better, and teachers actively sought out opportunities to teach in difficult schools where the opportunity to make a bigger difference was possible- and hence reap a great reward, both through intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.