Exactly. Compared to what I do, educating 15-20 future citizens and adults seems on par.

And to your broader point, indeed, the average US teacher at this point is 1/5 lesson planning, 3/5 instruction, 1/10 social worker, and 1/10 data entry/report filing.

And it should be very easy to fire bad ones. Basically should be at will employment with school district.

This is thorny, because it gets into the problems tenure was created to combat: school administration's goals aren't always student success.

Especially now, they can be myopically assessment-focused or political.

Subordinating teachers to the whim of administration wouldn't help this. Jury-of-their-peers is slightly better, but has its own issues.

If you want to know how badly otherwise seemingly mature adults can behave, come to a local school board meeting in Florida.

"For the kids" + average parent = asshole with no holds barred

The U.S. has a large contingent of free-market maximalists. These groups are opposed to public services like education and health care across the board. They are allied with right-wing religious groups who oppose public schools on religious grounds (they want a religious curriculum and that’s unconstitutional).

Their tactic is called “starve the beast.” They believe that underfunding and neglect will drive the best teachers out of the public school system and into private schools. Their goal is to bring about the collapse of the public school system and then ultimately convince voters to abolish public schools altogether.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/6f1m76/how_many_h...

I know this is a biased sample.