Could You Be a Little More Generic?

Richard Cohen's totally unforeseen disillusionment with the Obama Administration, regarding its failure to include education provisions in the stimulus package:

How about extending the school day, maybe for an hour or so? How about extending the school year? How about tinkering with the No Child Left Behind law but insisting that testing -- accountability -- be maintained? How about doing something about the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be? Now that women and minorities have more opportunities in almost every field, the best of them have abandoned teaching. The pay is lousy, and the work can be hard. Can $100 billion do something about that? Could be.

It'd be easy to say that, while I haven't read the stimulus package, were I a highly paid columnist with a nationally prominent paper like Cohen, I most certainly would make my way through its 647 pages before writing a column criticizing it, so that I may write with a degree of precision above that of a tenth-grade B student. That's a lie, though; I'm fairly certain that I would do no such thing. At the same time, in the age of Google, can't he get a little more specific than "...the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be"? What does that even mean?