Where Have All the Good Teachers Gone?
The teaching profession has been eviscerated by counterproductive policies like equitable grading and our laughably unserious teacher training colleges. Teachers are now something between daycare provider and HR manager with little technical expertise. They oversee a factory full of workers who don’t know what they’re building or why. Nobody pushes back because everyone gets paid regardless of what the factory turns out.
As I’ve detailed in multiple articles available on X (and on my substack; link in bio), the system incentivizes teachers to do the least possible work. Principals do not look for experts in their respective fields, they look for young, inexpensive, debt-laden college graduates with the right paperwork. The system then conditions them to follow orders using three carrots: summers off, minimal accountability (we can always blame the parents!) and tenure. In other words, it teaches them it’s okay to not work very hard.
A teacher who knows her subject, transmits that knowledge coherently, designs practice that helps students move it into long-term memory and expects students to later demonstrate mastery of all of the course material makes admin’s job much harder because it puts the lie to their grading systems (they’re all gamed) and behavioral controls (there aren’t any).
Once admin recognizes this aberration, she will be taught to change in one of two ways.
——-
More.
