The teacher and the program are responsible for the child's learning. This is the way it should be. But I have never been in a meeting in my 25 years as a school psychologist where the teacher or program were blamed for the child's failure. It was always the child's fault. The task of the building level team was to look at the test data and determine if the child had a learning disability or was developmentally handicapped.
Special education is the system's way of copping out from being responsible for the child's failure.
Tenure is vigorously promoted by teachers unions and jealously guarded by their political action committees. If you think the police maintain a 'blue wall of silence,' they are novices compared to teachers. A third teacher, from the South, wrote about a pattern he has encountered in 15 years on faculties. These are the teachers who consistently raise their students' achievement by more than one grade level per year. Another 45 percent are good solid teachers who do their jobs well.