Thanks - I'd wanted to touch on this, but my rant was already quite  long (& on touch phone)

1) voucher schools where they create conditions unlike public schools without the trouble kids - and then those teachers perform great (or else). Meanwhile, real teachers in public get forced to deal with highly disparate students - many borderline retarded, horribly backwards in reading level, unprepared for methodical schoolwork, and no parental backing from home to get them through study gaps - and showered with lots of "math & science & reading, math & science & reading" focused on a homogenous level of achievement unrelated to where a kid is. are the goals useful for the child? if the child passes that test but doesn't know a host of more important life skills & understanding & background info, are they better prepared for followup education or the real world? (how many people need science or more than basic math in their daily lives?) More important, if a teacher is talented in his/her field, the chances are he/she will be thrown into an environment where pedagogic technique is wasted because the students can't follow or the conditions in the school are too chaotic with too few resources.[read Daily Howler for this analysis ad nauseum - and where newspapers & savior bureaucrats will make up "facts" to gloss over both the real hurdles & lack of effectiveness of new methods - and perversely hide successes behind age-old stereotypes, pulling defeat from victory, ]

And then some Republican fucker will cut the school budget again and then complain about the lack of results in public schools. My father quit the Republican party because his state simply couldn't respond normally to an education crisis by funding the schools, and instead went into a "no taxes" mantra.

2) so yes, sometimes it's unfairly hard to fire an incompetent teacher - and put into context it's not surprising that if teachers invariably go into shitty politicized situations, they'll look for protective rules to shield themselves from inevitable outcomes - whether they're talented or incompetent.  If they were "the troops" we'd be going all loving on them for needing more pay and support  (except when they come home and we shove them in underfunded VA facilities and ignore their stress disorders)

3) I think there was a 3, but have to go do something real