> give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.
Seems like a bit of a non sequitur? If anything one could hope that a gym teacher would value play and movement over chaining kids to a desk all day?
My old gym teacher also taught science because we just couldn't find another teacher, and was genuinely surprised to learn there were forms of matter smaller than atoms.
My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's.
One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester.
Bonus: my driver's education teacher was arrested for a DUI (but not terminated)
These situations were all in different schools in different US states, so the lack of quality control in admin that you describe definitely resonates.
My best history teacher was the gym teacher who was really hired as loophole because they couldn't hire a basketball coach which is what he really was.
Anyway, he didn't give a crap about teaching to the curriculum and he taught us how to think critically and read between the lines of history.
I know a large number of teachers who have been campaigning for years to eliminate all forms of teacher evaluations, with the claim that “you can’t measure what we do!”.
Which is utter horse shit, but it’s where we are today.
The result is that many schools don’t really track teacher performance, and as you indicate you can get wild inconsistencies.
The best parents can do (other than leaving) is to aggressively direct kids into the better teachers’ classrooms. We see that all the time - one class has kids who’s parents are “in the know” and gets the good teacher, the other class is where the kids get dumped who’s parents don’t complain. The district knows who is bad and who is not, but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences.
Our school district local enrollment as a result has declined from around 900 kids to just 650 in just a few years as a result. The kids left are those too poor to go private or home school, those not lucky or connected enough to go to a “choice” school, and a small number of die hard loyalists reliving their glory days through their kids at the same school they went to.
> but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences
Everyone should watch the fantastic documentary "Waiting for Superman" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/) that highlighted just how problematic the teacher's unions have become and how much of an impediment to education they are.
Even in cases of gross negligence (showing up to school drunk, completely failing to teach, etc) bad teachers just get bounced to another school. Teachers who physically assault or sexually abuse a student might remain on the payroll for years while the bureaucracy slowly reviews their case.
The unions have also prevented any form of incentivizing teachers to perform well or rewarding good teachers. In fact, the union leaders prevented the teachers from even voting on changes (that the majority of teachers wanted) that would have allowed good teachers to be rewarded and bad teachers to be removed from the classroom.
There are a lot of problems with education in America, but the teachers unions have to be right at the very top of the list.
Amusingly I had the exact inverse of this experience. My senior year I signed up for the AP Bio course, but we only got 22 students signed up out of the 25 required to allow the class to happen (a very stupid system in of itself). Because the class was canceled, and the very competent well educated biology teacher had a slot free in his schedule, he was forced into teaching the gym class (which I also had to take since I'd been avoiding PE for the last few years). He knew the situation, and after the first week handed me the advanced bio textbook after class one day, and then turned a blind eye to me sitting on the bleachers reading instead of running laps for the rest of the semester (dont come at me for physical fitness, I was a skateboarder and in better shape than 90% of the kids already).
In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district.
Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.
He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.