>>>Here are my solutions to education:
1. Let students set teacher pay.
or,
2. Fire half the teachers and double the salaries of the rest.<<<
I’m pretty good with suggestion #1. Kids tend to be remarkably bad at making those kinds of decisions, and I’m willing to bet some student would say, “Hey, let’s give him a million bucks,” and a bunch of other kids would agree, without the slightest real understanding of what that kind of money looks like.
I’m also good with suggestion #2. I think I’d make the cut.
On an aside, I’m preparing for one of the cultists to ask me my preferred pronouns. My answer is going to be a series of questions. “How do I grade pronouns in student writing? Do we have to ask the person being written about for their preferred pronouns? Is it worse to misgender a person or to ignore the state Language Arts standards, which specifically tell us to teach students about the proper use of pronouns? Do we have to review the gender identities of all fictional characters before starting to write about them or discuss them?”
I could go on for quite a while in this vein. I probably shouldn’t smile while saying this.
Kids tend to be remarkably bad at making those kinds of decisions
Kids tend to be remarkably good at assessing teacher ability.
But that’s not the point: the point is that students are not the clients of the teachers, so the incentives are all wrong. To fix our schools, students must have consideration in the contract. As is now, they have none.