> We have spent the last 40 years reducing teacher autonomy, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's harder to get teachers who care.
I think schools are in a death-spiral where they can't get enough decent teachers with good judgement who can work autonomously, so they keep clamping down with more control over teachers' day-to-day activities, which just drives away more of the good teachers because working like that sucks.
Current high inflation (wage-inflation plus just the regular kind) is going to drive this to a crisis point before long, I think—when fast food joints have signs up begging people to apply at $17/hr with basically no education requirements, a starting salary in the low-$30k range requiring a bachelor's degree starts to look like something only a crazy person would opt to do.
[EDIT] Relatedly, school admin is also totally fucked up. The people doing those jobs are generally terrible for a bunch of reasons, including that they're also under-paid for the kind of person you'd really want doing those jobs, while also being very high-paid relative to teachers. Teachers who may or may not be good at teaching, but who are not good at admin, go into it because it's the only way to make real money in education until you're nearly at retirement age and holding a PhD, on a classroom teacher pay-scale, and people who can't hack it in private sector management go into it because it pays pretty well and you can coast while getting an ego-boost from being the Big (Wo)Man In Charge and bossing people around. The entire field is a cess-pit of incompetence, neglect, and outright idiocy, and it's a huge problem that doesn't get enough attention compared with teacher quality.
I think schools are in a death-spiral where they can't get enough decent teachers with good judgement who can work autonomously, so they keep clamping down with more control over teachers' day-to-day activities, which just drives away more of the good teachers because working like that sucks.
Current high inflation (wage-inflation plus just the regular kind) is going to drive this to a crisis point before long, I think—when fast food joints have signs up begging people to apply at $17/hr with basically no education requirements, a starting salary in the low-$30k range requiring a bachelor's degree starts to look like something only a crazy person would opt to do.
[EDIT] Relatedly, school admin is also totally fucked up. The people doing those jobs are generally terrible for a bunch of reasons, including that they're also under-paid for the kind of person you'd really want doing those jobs, while also being very high-paid relative to teachers. Teachers who may or may not be good at teaching, but who are not good at admin, go into it because it's the only way to make real money in education until you're nearly at retirement age and holding a PhD, on a classroom teacher pay-scale, and people who can't hack it in private sector management go into it because it pays pretty well and you can coast while getting an ego-boost from being the Big (Wo)Man In Charge and bossing people around. The entire field is a cess-pit of incompetence, neglect, and outright idiocy, and it's a huge problem that doesn't get enough attention compared with teacher quality.