The problem with the profession is no one agrees on how to accurately quantify what a "good" teacher is.
Is it the teacher kids love and are friends with? The teacher that is strict and forces workloads on the students? Is it the teacher that offers help after class and gives you credit just for showing your work or attempting the assignment?
When I was in HS I had a history teacher that literally would read the newspaper all hour. He would assign us pages to read at home and during class in our history books and that was it.
Then we would test on it. We were teaching ourselves and he was a teacher that my mom, my brother, my aunt and uncles also had....
There just isn't a way to get rid of horrible teachers and encourage creativity from the good ones.
Like Matt Damon said "maybe you're a shitty cameraman" but both jobs iirc are protected by unions. Most people dont' belong to a union and if you suck you're fired fairly quickly.
An even greater problem is that even if we could come to a conclusion about what a "good" teacher is it is almost impossible to fairly judge a teacher based on it.
Lets just say we make the definition of a "good" teacher one that is "good at imparting the knowledge to their students that they need". So many factors go into how well that is accomplished both within and beyond the teachers control that it's almost impossible to judge a teachers performance in any standardized or fair fashion.
I would like to see a situation where teachers get compensated more for being good teachers and less or even fired for being bad teachers, but outside of absolutely blatantly obvious bad teachers I don't know how you do that in a way that's even remotely fair. Just off the top of my head the things I can think of that influence teacher and student performance
1. The skill of the teacher in teaching others.
2. The knowledge a teacher has in the subject they teach. (Which is not the same as number one because I've known teachers that had mediocre knowledge of their subject and taught well and people that were probably brilliant but sucked when it came to actually teaching others what they knew.)
3. The resources the teacher has.
4. The resources the school or place of learning has for people to use.
5. The willingness of the students to want to learn.
6. The class sizes teachers have to deal with.
7. The willingness of parents to want their children to learn and make sure they do and become involved in their education.
8. The ability for parents with all the other things going on in their life to make number 7 happen, especially when we live in a time where both parents more often than not have to work to support the family.
9. The socio-economic circumstances of the students which a huge factor and involves things like how much they have to work themselves or take care of other members of the family to make ends meat, what type of community they live in, how much violence they have to deal with in their lives, how much resources their parents have to help them learn, among a lot of other things.
Remember there is probably still a lot of things I'm not thinking of.
Still there's more to consider, like what would happen if a teacher just gets a below average group of students for a couple of years? What happens if people base pay of a teachers performance, and what would stop them from just tailoring their teaching to doing whatever is designed to raise standardized test performance instead of doing what teaches best, or just stop the teachers from cheating to make themselves look better at that?
Even if they didn't go the standardized route and we had panels of people judge the teacher's performance that were in the area then you come upon things like cronyism, internal politics, arbitrary decisions, and other things that make it almost as bad.
With the list of things I gave above most of those are not in the teachers' control, and there are decent or even very good teachers can have bad performing students for a wide variety of reasons. I can see getting rid of people that are just very blatantly bad at teaching, but for the most part I don't know how to even begin judging most teachers in a manner that's adequate. I don't know how we, as we are now, come to a point where we can differentiate substandard teachers and teachers that are acceptable at their jobs, but look worse than they really are due to circumstances outside of their control.
If anything I think how poorly we do at learning speaks more to the numerous flaws in our entire society than it does to the teachers we have.
