Great story - your children are lucky. As for the "NEA shills", as you put it, most teachers today don't shill - they don't understand enough to do it. They actually believe the rubbish that has been pumped into their heads by the NEA and schools of ed. The BU Ed School Dean sums it up nicely:
"Dean Edwin J. Delattre of Boston University School of Education - one of the harshest critics of teacher training - says there are no more than 50 good teacher training institutions among the 1,300 in the country. Of the others, he says: "They admit and graduate students who have low levels of intellectual accomplishment. They are well-intentioned, decent, nice people who by and large don't know what they're doing.""
This is why it is so difficult to reach people working in the public schools with any sort of reasoned argument. There are, of course, geniuses and near geniuses working in the schools, but mostly, and especially among the newer teachers, you are dealing with intellectual cripples. And the administrators are worse - they have lower GRE scores than elementary school teachers. A $600 billion/year institution run by its worst and dumbest, not its best and brightest.
For an interesting article, see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9905.innerst.method.html
Dear achilles2000,
I can affirm what you're saying about intellectual capacity of education majors. In college, I studied in pyschology, and I had a particular interest in clinical and other testing. A little research showed that education majors were bringing up the rear on SATs as well as GREs.
It was truly scary.
sitetest