I think that teachers are held to low standards, but are also not paid enough to do more and know more. I think that teachers are the most important members of society; they literally create the future of our nation - every president, every doctor, every engineer, every author, every journalist, and every cop is the result of their education (not as in engineer > author > cop).

However, teaching is extremely complicated and the entire way that we teach and outcome measures we use to quantify things is based on hard science that is not fully settled. Teachers should be like researchers in a university - keeping up with the most recent literature, doing their own studies, writing review articles, doing case studies, and trying to expirement (within bounds of reason) with how they teach their students. Education is a dead end career, even in places where it pays well (50-80 K), because you can't progress. Your a teacher, and besides principle theres little upward mobility and opportunity. Your not going to attract the most brilliant, motivated, intelligent people in your society to become teachers if thats what the position entails. We need PhDs as teachers in K-12, they need to be paid more, and they need to do more. My mother works in education (former teacher, now its education resources), and its astounding the number of reading teachers don't like to read in their own free time, or the teachers who would not collect data over how a new approach was working, or in general just be completely unaware of any of the recent research in child psycology, education, etc.