Teacher's Union, NEA, tenure, no merit based performance raises, etc.
You show up, you get paid. You practically CAN'T get fired.
Now, many teachers DO teach, but there's no incentive for excellence.
The problem in education is the unions; by empowering the unions to do all the talking for them, they've stripped themselves of the power to speak for themselves. And so the teachers claim they have no control or real say in running their classes. The unions are the teachers' worst enemies.
The trick though is to accumulate enough seniority to move out of the classroom into one of those educational "administrative" positions that is the fastest growing area of the profession. Those people get top pay while not having to actually teach classes anymore. Those tasks are given to those with the least seniority or the substitutes or teacher's aides.
The worse the education system, the more money can be demanded from the legislators to fix it. Then those with the most seniority take most of the added funding and hire more workers at the lowest pay to do the teaching. Notice how these teachers on these public service announcements all have these bloated stupid expressions as they demand more money for themselves?
Even the kids don't respect them for that and when one doesn't have the respect of those he holds power over, it is a very dangerous situation indeed.
Not all teachers belong to unions (I taught in TX, no teacher's unions, thank goodness) and it's simply not true that it's almost impossible to fire a teacher. At least where I taught, we were there with a contract each year. According to my contract they could fire me for cause (which means, whatever they felt was cause) and I've known teachers who simply were not offered a contract for the next year.
I'm sure it's a state by state.
I do agree there's not much incentive for excellence as pay is based on years of service. I guess some of us are just masochists.
susie