I predict in the future, people on the right will more frequently use "Baby Sitters" as the derogatory (and accurate) slang for "teachers," and the teachers unions will actually take great umbrage to it.
They will huff and puff, but it won't change the truth, which is most of them ARE effectively overpaid baby sitters.
I dream of the day we have high school seniors paid to teach k-6 grades at a mere fraction of the cost it takes us now with similar, if not, better results...and much lower property taxes.
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Actually, it's been done. Sort of. In post WWII Kansas, they were so short of teachers for the rural school districts that as a high school graduate, you could get a provisional teaching certificate to teach. You renewed your certificate by going to summer school each summer. My mother (now 84) got her start that way in a stereotypical one-room schoolhouse. She says the summer school classes were heavy on content and much lighter on classroom teaching theory. Of course, they actually cared that the kids could read and do math and such.
As recently as 10 years ago, we had several teachers in our school district that had only a 2-year teacher's degree - back when they had teacher's colleges that weren't on the caliber of 4 year universities.
Worse, they hadn't made any attempt to get their 4-year degree.
Worse yet, they were awful teachers who had essentially retired 30 years.
Parents had complained about them for decades, but hey when you have tenure and a union protecting your sorry asses, there's not much you can do.
There are actually a few really great teachers who know their subjects - less than 5% qualify for this. There might be another 10% that are good and qualified, but the vast majority are mediocre teachers with with equally mediocre knowledge backing that up.
The bottom 40% ought to just quit and work as a clerk at a convenience store.
Dump the union, dump tenure, evaluate teacher performance and dump the bottom 10% of teachers every year.
It's rapidly coming where internet-delivered education will be necessary even in elementary school because the classroom teachers can't teach even basic math and science.
You can home school your kids and with the assistance of other home schoolers and the internet, do a MUCH better job teaching your kids than your local schools could.
Part of me thinks that public schools cannot be fixed and ought to just shut down and started all over from scratch.
In my opinion we should use our technology in our schools. Set up computer based training courses for every subject. The children do those CBT's at school or at home, if they pass the quiz at the end of the section they go on to the next. The teacher doesn't regurgitate content, their job is to help students past problem areas, and remedial instruction for the ones who aren't keeping up. Everyone may be on a different area in each subject, and that's okay.
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