Teachers Aren't the Problem

As I wrote over here in response to a post about "improving" the teaching profession:

The way you improve the teaching profession is that you recognize the problem in education is not with teachers. The problem is with the structure of public education, which is a top-down, virtually dictatorial, approach that heavily favors administrators over teachers. It is unlike anything else in this economy, this extreme power imbalance between principals especially and teachers. This stems from the simple fact principals are not closely supervised by superiors and therefore they can do virtually anything they want to teachers and have the power to blackball teachers from ever teaching again anywhere in the country. Principals have the unilateral power to destroy teachers’ careers, and they can do it very easily despite whether or not that teacher has a “right” to continuing employment, and, when they mess up, which is often, are not fired outright but are merely moved around, demoted, or even promoted to central office positions. Many principals have collective bargaining rights, which should NEVER be allowed for supervisory personnel, and this all but guarantees lifetime employment, unlike teachers.

“Reformers” will never tackle this very real problem with the poor quality of the majority if not vast majority of principals because many of these reformers are made of the same sociopathic cloth.