| People generally respect professionals more when they have the choice of shopping for the professionals who fit their needs. You would respect plumbers less if every time you needed a pipe fixed, you were assigned a plumber by your "plumbing district" and the plumbing district received revenues from your taxes whether your pipes leak or not. Teachers should take advantage of the opportunity to be treated like real professionals by supporting education reforms that give learners (and the adult guardians of minor learners) more power to shop for providers of education. (By the way, I can tell that I am a good bit older than you are by the short time frame of your comment. Commentary about government-operated oligopoly schools not being staffed by teachers who are able to do their best for the learners in their care goes back many more decades than you guess.) Something that HAS changed about teaching, as an occupation, in the United States in my longer lifetime is that now women have many more employment opportunities besides schoolteaching. When a woman can become a medical doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, she may decide to take her talents into other labor markets besides the labor market for staffing schools. http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cupton/Senior%20Seminar/Papers... Again, I think if schools were more client-responsive, because learners had more power to shop, that would change management practices of schools and allow schools to reward better the teachers who do the best work. A teacher who does a good job is worth her weight or his weight in gold. http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality But the incentives in the current system, in which most schools get the bulk of their revenues from taxes, results or not, don't set up incentives for schools to value teachers who do well as schools should. |