To respond to Chris22^^^:
In America, teachers are generally from the bottom third of college applicants. The low pay/high stress of it ensures that either people go into it who can't think of anything else to do, or the occasional bleeding heart accomplished student with super high morals that wants to teach. In addition, American teachers spend far more time working than teachers in Finland for significantly less pay. Their teachers are viewed (and paid) comparatively to doctors and lawyers. They also provide well-supported, continuous professional development for their teachers, ensuring that even the worst teachers become better.
That about sums it up. They are not evaluated in the way that American educators are. If you start off with the best and brightest, you end up with better quality teachers.
I think that Lski'stach's quote here pretty much sums it up. I teach future teachers (I'm a university professor). This is exactly what I would have written about the kids who go into teaching. It absolutely is true, unfortunately, that the vast majority of my students who want to go into education are among my poorest-performing students. This has been true for as long as I have been doing this (more than 20 years). And then there is the occasional fantastic student who really wants to make a difference. The problem with those students, unfortunately, is that the teacher training programs at universities have so much ridiculous hoop-jumping in the name of "assessment" and "accountability" that about half of those really fantastic students eventually drop out of the education piece and just do a non-education major in their discipline because the process disillusions them so much that they (rightly, in my view) cannot see themselves putting up with an entire career of similar drudgery for the relatively poor salary and long hours that they see as their likely future.
So, again, I will reiterate that if we made teachers' salaries very attractive and stopped thinking that the pathway to making good teachers was to evaluate them to death, we would likely see much better success.
This was me in a nutshell. My student teaching coordinator said I was one of the best natural teachers she'd ever seen. Teaching jobs are few and far between for secondary history teachers (my bad, I should have studied math), so, I accepted a job in the corporate world making literally tens of thousands of dollars more for FAR less work. I deserve a heart face punch for my college degree. Complete waste of my time.
I could not stand the BS that I had to go through to get my Ed degree. People who were garbage in the classroom, but could 'analyze' and 'reflect' well, outscored me on teaching assessments, even though I would tear it up in the classroom.
I think for me, teacher issues could be partly ameliorated by several factors:
1. Abolish unions - Control over the work force is essential. Good teachers are like porn - hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. Unions (at least in my limited teaching experience) prevent old bad teachers from being replaced by fresh and enthusiastic teachers.
2. Abolish the Nat'l dept. of Ed. Writing curriculum for 80 million kids is impossible. Writing curriculum for 100 was damn hard. The more we dilute the curriculum, the harder it becomes to assess both teachers and students. Curriculum should be done at the state or even the local level.
3. Pay good teachers more.
4. Allow students to chase their passions. How many people who went to school in the 60's felt that they loved their education? Wrote memorization is dead. We don't need to memorize times tables or dates in history. We have the the google for that and we should embrace that future instead of riling about how the 'young folk' are ruining America because they don't know when the Dec. of Ind. was signed. Education should be project based and the micromanaging of administrators prevents this.
5. Allow kids to go outside for class. When I student taught, I tried to get my kids outside for a lesson. In order for this to happen, I had to get signed permission from the parents of EVERY child, my coordinating teacher and my principal. The gripe is really about the absurd amount of bureaucracy that teachers have to go through on a daily basis.
6. Make teaching appealing to young people. At least two of my fellow ed students have dropped out of the profession in less than a year. The current educational system heavily favors the older teachers. You know, the ones who have taught the same lessons for 20 years and generally make students want to die from boredom (see abolish unions, point #1).
7. Eliminate standardized testing. Standardized testing is ridiculous. Literally every single human who has taught a group of children knows that those scores are garbage. What if Johnny's mom and dad kept him awake last night because they were fighting? Is Johnny a poor performer? As his teacher you would know the answer to that. In the eyes of the state, he is a poor performer, and because he did poorly, you (the teacher) also did poorly. Also, you only have two years of experience? Guess we're gonna have to let you go.
8. Pay student teachers. Probably the most whiny of my complaints. When I student taught, I worked my ass off. I drove to the school assigned to me (Wanted to bike like a good mustachian, but the principal would not allow me in the school before 7:10 to shower when school started at 7:25) using a friend's car, paid for gas, bought school supplies for some of my students who did not have them and worked for 50 hours a week. Developed, designed and implemented my own curriculum because my teaching coordinator's lessons were stale as hell. You should have seen the looks on my students' faces when I told them how much a paid per hour to be teaching them (still makes me chuckle more than a year later).
After a semester of that Garbage, there was no way I could remain idealistic about being a teacher.
I would still love to teach, maybe after I FIRE, work as a private school teacher or something like that, but, otherwise, you can have my teaching degree. I don't need it.
TL;DR - Teaching stinks from the teacher's perspective. Hard work, crappy pay, and no end in sight.
