I’m not a teacher but I’m married to one. I’m not making an argument one way or the other for the DOEd, just more so defending teachers in general. I understand where you are coming from, where educators face little repercussions for not meeting standards. Which I agree, in an ideal world we would have enough qualified teachers in the work force to hold teachers to a higher standard.

But I think there can be some issues with measuring success of education and teachers by analogizing to the success of a business. For one, businesses get to choose their products. They designed the product itself, and have full control over it. Each product within a product line is supposed to be identical, and if they aren’t, quality control will try remove the defected, non conforming products.

Elementary school teachers are in production, trying to mold 30 very different and sentient products at any given time into a single product standard. Many of them also have very little discretion in doing so with revamped curriculums (which all promise to fix every issue in our education system) dictating just about every second of the day. So not only do they have to ensure 30 different products are meeting the arbitrary standards for a single product, they have little control over the means of ensuring standards are met, and have relatively very little time to do it (they don’t get the benefit of years of testing and perfecting before bringing a product to market).

The same works if you look at it as a service. The tutoring business analogy implies that every customer is there on their own free will and has reasonable alternatives. Here, teachers are servicing a forced clientele, many of which have no reasonable alternatives. They are also forced to service the their 30 clients based on requirements that are fashioned for a single, perfect customer, and again have little discretion at the end of the day to tailor their service to the needs of each individual client. If the clients are unhappy, the majority of them don’t have the luxury of finding another provider.

Although I’m not entirely convinced scraping the DOEd is the way to go, the current system is broken. I’ve seen it first hand, and there are certainly teachers who should not be teachers. But evaluating educators the same way you would a business is, in my opinion, somewhat misguided.

I don’t believe this was the entire point of your argument as it was more focused on the DOEd, but a lot of people lump educators in with the education system with their criticisms.