Sorry for the snark, but you did say elementary school teachers need to know calculus. Since there were only 7 kids in my high school who took it out of a graduating class of 1000 (and I ended up dropping it), I'd say this would be limiting the talent pool quite a bit. I'd also like to think we bring more value to society in our current roles as doctors and systems engineers.
I may have oversimplified things when I said curriculum is not generally chosen by educators... maybe "out-of-touch ex-educators" would have encapsulated the idea better. School boards are generally made up of people who went from the classroom to administrative positions, which are more political in nature, setting them up for the political job of sitting on a school board. So you're generally talking about curriculum choices made by people who haven't been in a classroom in years. You're also talking about 5-9 individuals making decisions on behalf of thousands of teachers. So again, let's not tar all with the same brush. Every time curriculum changes, I hear an torrent of complaints from professional teachers... some criticism good, and some because many people hate change.
I agree with the paper you referenced, but it doesn't say anything about teachers having to know calculus. I also don't understand how you can hold teachers individually responsible for not understanding things that, as the paper points out, were poorly taught to the teachers to begin with, in the same system they are now contributing to.
In fact, you can see the seeds of this nonsense of Everyday Math here, because the paper correctly points out that adults frequently graduate college and move on to teaching professions able to perform mathematical procedures in their sleep, but with very little understanding of why the procedures work. So they attend an Everyday Math seminar, have an overdue epiphany they call "number sense," and think that's something they should have gotten as 8yos. And they have a good point... it's just that EM is well-suited to teaching that to adults, not to 8yos.
