Public School Teachers and Administrators: How should we fire them?

[MadHound]

6. Rather than focusing on getting rid of bad teachers,

How about focusing on attracting the best and brightest to the profession. After, according to the general consensus, teaching is one of the vital professions in our society, ranking right up there with doctors. Yet we pay teachers like babysitters, and in the process we lose most of the best and brightest. I've personally known several excellent students who wanted to teach, who would have made great teachers, but they took one look at the student debt they were racking up, and the starting pay for teaching, and decided to go into another, more profitable area.

This happens with veteran teachers as well. They put their twenty years in, and looking ahead, decide to take their experience into another career, one that pays better.

So if teachers are as important as doctors, why not start paying them like doctors? That's what the top education systems in the world do. Not only do they pay their teachers the same rate as doctors, but they accord teachers the same respect as we do to doctors. As non-doctors, we would not think of jogging a surgeons elbow, thinking that we knew a better technique. Yet somehow lots of people, despite not being teachers, think that they are education experts and many are actually put in charge of education systems. What a ridiculous way to run an education system. Sorry, I don't think that a welder, despite being elected to the school board, is qualified to make decisions regarding education. So why don't we let actual educators make the decisions regarding education. After all, they are the experts.

Make these changes, and I guarantee you that the problem of bad teachers will take care of itself.