Gee, I'll bet you were a peach to teach.

Let's just fire all the teachers and see if the next batch of applicants do any better.

I'm a software engineer and I'll happily admit that I'm grossly overpaid for the contribution to society I provide.

I'm curious what you think teachers should be paid for trying to educate our future.

There's a market that works on software engineers. Ability, work ethic, and quality of output plays a significant part in who gets hired and fired. There are no mechanisms by which bad teachers are removed, as long as they check the boxes for attendance, not being visibly intoxicated, etc. The profession is riddled with incompetents and bad actors.

Actual good teachers are rare.

Simply being able to fire the bad ones would improve things immeasurably, but for some reason people put all teachers on pedestals. It's grotesque. Give PTAs hire/ fire powers or better yet, give the public a vote, weighted by testing scores or some performance metrics. Union ride or die is a garbage way to do things.

Treating teachers like a special caste of unimpeachable holy people is nonsense.

> Give PTAs hire/ fire powers or better yet, give the public a vote,

They are already good at driving good teachers out of the profession without a formal direct personnel role, giving them more power would make things worse.

Teachers can be fired for poor performance. It is just rare, because proving poor performance is dubious in education. Good teachers want bad teachers out. There just isn’t a motivating force for the supervisor to do it unless the teacher is truly a harm to the kids.

Everything going on in education over the past 20 years has been to add that overarching, cross school performance metric to measure teachers against each other. The problem is:

1. How do you measure performance? Tests. What will any educator or student tell you? Ends up test performance doesn’t really correlate much to the quality of the teacher. What it does correlate well to is income of the student’s parents. You teach in a school that serves low-income families? You’re fired. Also tests don’t factor that some students are special needs. You have a lot of special needs students in your class one year? Sorry. You’re fired.

2. No one could seem to find the money to incentivize good performance of teachers. Just fire poor performers based on dubious criteria. Not exactly motivating.

3. Outside of test scores, which are a bad representation of teacher quality and easily manipulated, there isn’t a driving force to fire teachers.

Your comments may be true some places but are broadly generalized. The states I’ve lived in have had great public school systems. They pay their teachers well and have great pensions and benefits. Where I grew up the administration did a terrible job managing funds but our teachers were great and eventually the state stepped in and got things running better. Problem is there are just some places that don’t give a shit about public education and places that have a big push to privatize it, and that sure as shit doesn’t always mean better. Just means our tax dollars are going to some company instead of straight to schools.