Dude:
Respectfully, your ideology is showing a bit in your last message.
Yes, but ideology became a part of the conversation the moment a conservative "think tank" was introduced as evidence.
Education degrees are well-known to be lacking in substance. They simply don't transfer to fields outside education. Public school teachers tend to have very low GRE scores. In fact, they're consistently at the bottom of the pile. ETS documents this fact annually in its reports on scores by intended grad school major. Private school teachers tend to have higher GRE scores and have degrees in the subjects they teach more often.
Fair points, but none of this makes the degrees any cheaper. Also, I'm not sure why we're talking about GRE scores here, since grad school is not a requirement for the overwhelming majority of teaching positions.
Now, if you want to talk about why a 5-year degree (bachelor's plus additional teaching credentials) is necessary to teach 3rd graders to multiply and divide, there's a conversation to be had there.
I would be interested in seeing your thoughts on the questions I asked on August 10 in reply to your message.
Okay, I can boil your post to two questions:
1) Why do we need teacher protections?
A: Because they sit at the nexus of four competing, and often idiotic, forces. In addition to the challenges of dealing with their own students, the other forces are legislative, bureaucratic, and parental. Their position puts them at a high risk of false accusations, blame taking, etc.
Also, they do a critical job for low pay. It takes two to negotiate a contract, and in this case the teachers' unions have given ground on compensation in exchange for things like job protection. Now they're being attacked for their job protections, retirement pay, etc., as if nobody believes in contract law anymore.
2) Why can't teachers in the US be evaluated, when schools around the world do it?
A: Straw man, because we already evaluate teachers. The question is whether we should use objective testing mechanisms as the primary basis for ranking teachers and making firing decisions, to which I would say that any mechanism that ignores crucial data is bound to be flawed. Also, pitting teachers against each other is a lose-lose proposition, because some will naturally be dealt a weaker hand, and that's in the hands of the principals that the thread consensus established earlier cannot be trusted to make sensible decisions.
Consider my daughter's elementary school, which groups children based on behavior. The disruptive students get concentrated in one class. Is there value in having a teacher who can successfully discipline unruly students? Yep. Is there value in allowing the more disciplined students to flourish in a more disciplined environment? Yep.
Is it fair to penalize this teacher because her charges will naturally fare less well on objective testing standards? Nope.
