Anyone who tries to blame the teachers for the failures of students to learn gets that reaction. Perhaps I am overreacting in your case, but the idea of students judging teachers is a democracy of fools in my book. In fact, this is an old intellectual bashing trick employed by virtually all authoritarian regimes from Mussolini to Stalin, to Mao Tse tung and to Bush and his right wing supporters.
It is a stupid and fascist idea because, while looking "democratic" on is surface, deep down it is authoritarian and anti-humanistic. It implies that the process of teaching is like the process of fixing mechanical devices - a good mechanic is the one who knows which button to push to make the engine run. This is not only authoritarian, but also anti-humanistic, as it diminishes the role of human agency in students.
The process of learning is that of interaction between the student and the subject matter, in which the student tries to overcome obstacles and gain a skill in the process. Teachers are mere gate- and score- keepers in that process, their role is to bear witness to student's struggle with the object of learning, mark progress, offer a few useful hints and bring more challenges if the student becomes too confident in his/her own ability.
This has always been like that for millennia, and still is in the areas where training and results really matter e.g. in sports. It was nicely shown in the film _Million dollar baby_ which I finally had a chance to see.
The bottom line is that you do not ever question your teachers if you do not succeed - you question your ability and motivation. And if you do not think that you can learn anything from that particular teacher - it means that you should find yourself a different teacher or perhaps a different career.
Learning has always been student-centered in the sense that it was students who did all the hard work with teachers on their backs - keeping the score and throwing in new obstacles. But this was the only way to built a real skill. However, the growth of helping professions in the 20the century gave birth to teacher-centered education, in which the teacher, a specialist, uses his/her skills to "fix" the passive students.
In this approach, teachers are expected to do the hard work and "imbue" passive students with a skill or knowledge, just like a computer programmer is supposed program the passive machine to perform a series of tasks. If the students-machines fail to perform the program, obviously it must the fault of the teacher-programmer.
It is interesting how this essentially fascist idea got support from assorted liberals and lefties. What did the trick, imho, is cleaver marketing this teaching philosophy as anti-intellectual populism. "Down with the authoritarian experts, and their knowledge - let them be accountable to the people and make them do only what the people want them to do." This approach reverberates in virtually unchanged form in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China and curiously, the United States. The faux populism was the trick that sold this fascist idea to the left in this country - just like the faux "tough" look sells SUSv to suburban safe-seeking sheep.
Of course, the problem is not limited to educational philosophies. I think as far more menacing thing is that the whole culture is going in the direction of consumerism and professional entertainment of increasingly passive audience. The underlying model is that people do not have to have any skills at all - be it manual, mental, communicative, artistic, or whatever - all they need to do it is to flip through the channels and find the one that looks most 'exciting.'
IMHO, it is this culture of consumerism that is the main culprit. Schools mainly echo this approach by trying to entertain rather than challenge the students - and they are deemed failures if they ain't entertaining enough. This is, in a sense, to be expected in a country that practically invented consumerism. What I find nonplussing, however, is that people who pride themselves in a critical view of this consumerist heaven fall for its pitfalls nonetheless.
Wojtek