Teacher Quality Issues

Maybe by underpaying teachers and getting a lot of weird ones as result?

Probably the issue is that most teachers are quite bad and there's a limit to how much they can improve. So most teachers probably don't want any of this.

From the sounds of it: no one, it's just bad. Teachers are passed over for jobs that they should be getting, schools are having difficulty filling teaching roles (and are probably paying extra for temporary teachers), and students are being instructed poorly by a revolving door of poorly qualified teachers. This isn't a zero-sum scenario; getting the right teachers into the right jobs makes everyone happier.

Relevant article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030778I think the author is spot on. I think the idea of firing all teachers to get the results you want undermines the profession as a whole and I really appreciate his analogy to firing the "bottom 10%" of programmers. There is just so much more a teacher has to do to reach "success", especially when dealing with low-income comm

Judging by teacher's earnings.. they are probably very badly selected and trained.

I'm not a teacher, but my wife is and I've been able to see how dysfunctional the school district is.- teachers across subjects get paid at the same rate table. Math & Science teachers have a higher opportunity cost but they get the same wage as a PE teacher. I've talked with people in the union and other people, and basically they don't believe that free market principles should dictate how much people get paid.- new teacher burnout: new teachers get the worst classes to teach, while

Teacher quality has been mentioned, often in the context of the difficulty of firing bad teachers in many U.S. school systems.

The real problem is that the demand for good teachers far exceeds the supply. As a result large numbers of kids are left under educated. Teachers unions deny the existence of bad teachers. The clearest evidence for bad teachers is the existence of good teachers. Similarly, the clearest evidence of bad schools is the existence of good schools.Interestingly, you can find bad teachers and bad schools at all points of per pupil spending. Money is an important variable, but not the only signi

Underlying problem: people don't want to pay teachers enough.

The main problem with teachers is that the price for them is not controlled by quality. A teacher who performs better than other teachers (e.g. a 10x teacher) will not be worth more in the current system. And with the quality/price relation missing, there is nothing a teacher can do about the price, and consequently their wages will be as low as possible.