Thanks. I’ve written about teacher education in the past. It’s not pretty. It’s about indoctrinating the indoctrinators.
Kudos to your wife. I wish there were more like her.
One of my doctors has a daughter who went East to get her education at MIT. She now works for a new company that makes educational software. That is the future. Give kids the basics, how to read and how to compute, and let them go on their individual self-paced supervised learning journey. Teachers would be standing by as facilitators.
Another thing, Middle School kids. They have no manners. Their teachers here describe themselves as ranchers more than educators. The challenge is to keep order in classes that are 60% Black/Hispanic and 40% White/Asian. States like Iowa probably don't have this racial diversity.
I took my son out of Public School at grade 1 when a Black kid was pushing and tripping him. I put him in private school and he earned scholarships to Lawrenceville (2yrs) and RL Stevenson School (Pebble Beach, CA) for 3years. From there, the placement people got him one of 100 Presidential Scholarships at USC, where he majored in EE and Computer Engineering. He works at CBS now in LA. He's in his thirties and not married. When he does marry and raise children, he will most probably be very careful about relying on Government schools to educate his own.