The low academic quality of many of our teachers is neither flattering nor comfortable to confront, but confront it we must if we're to do anything about our sorry state of education.
=============================
Guys, From beginning to end, this is a REAL "teacher basher". Or, is it right on the money. There follows a slight reversal{?} found in the middle of the article. Peace and love, George.
An important component of that environment is the capacity to remove students who are alien and hostile to the education process.
Interesting article, George.
Williams is right that many of those who major in education and become teachers are at the bottom of the academic barrel. There are also some teachers who are near the top academically, and put up with all the B.S. because they love to teach.
Of my high school graduating class, the valedictorian and the student with the highest SAT score (2 different people) are both currently teachers. This was a rather small high school, and from the same class also came chemical, electrical and nuclear engineers, accountants, and at least one doctor and one dentist, so it wasn't exactly a class of slackers.
Williams is correct, as usual, that there are factors other than the quality of teachers affecting the quality of education - those include the quality of students, political factors, and administrative factors.
Prospective teachers should be held to a higher academic standard, but I'm not sure if that's going to happen until working conditions and salaries improve. Kind of a chicken-and-egg sort of thing: if they raised standards, I'm not sure they'd be able to get enough teachers to fill classrooms at this point.