Witness the hysterical anger that the teacher unions react with to any suggestion of more/better utilization of standardized testing to guage student's educational state. The current reward punishment system for teachers is in no way merit-based. They have managed to remove the actual results of their work from the equation that judges their fitness to be employed in that work.
I don't think this is self-evident. I'll need a concrete example. The teacher's union (national and state-level) literature I've read that was sent to my mother doesn't reflect this attitude at all.
see, many teachers in the system are in a position with authority to disagree with your perceptions of how the system works. The union doesn't disagree with every standard put out there. But most of the testing standards are just additional tests that get in the way of teaching -- and they are rarely complete measures of what can and should be accomplished with teaching. I'm sorry, but I fail to see that as real evidence that the teachers and their union oppose improvements to the system, which frankly, comes off as quite ridiculous. What benefit, exactly, does standardized testing give us anyway? After 13 years in the system and several more watching it develop both for my kids and in my mom's experience, I still can't comprehend the benefit that pulls kids out of 3-5 days of actual teaching so they can fill in bubbles for tests that don't take into account several important factors that have nothing to do with the quality of the education their getting (for example, their attention span and ability to sit there and take those tests at all, regardless of whether they know the answers).
Being familiar with my mother and many of her firends from work, I can tell you that the good teachers would also like to get rid of the bad teachers.
Your complaint about paying more being ineffective fails to take into account the fact that every year more teachers are hired. So maybe there's not an immediate and complete change. But that won't happen in ANY political situation short of a violent overthrow, which I hope I can safely say is not something we want to happen in our school systems. There will be an immediate beginning to gradual change. Teachers retire, new ones are hired. If we make the job both desirable and competitive to get to, only the best will be introduced. In the course of 10 years, there will be a major improvement. I don't think any faster change is feasable, and I can't think of a way to do it.
And despite what Mr. Gates says, the school systems, their approaches, their policies, and their methods change from year to year. School administrations try to stay on top of the best methods. It's difficult to make wholesale change in such large structures, but there are numerous gradual changes every year in approaches.
No, I don't think that pay raises are the ONLY way we can improve it. But I do think it's a very viable, necessary, and driving force for positive change. It will not just result in bad teachers being paid more. It will result in better teachers over all, using better practices that they learned in increasingly difficult college curriculums.
Note that I have no problem with home schooling. I've considered it myself. My mom doesn't like it, though I suspect that's professional reasons. But I don't think that the public school system has all the educational problems that are constantly ascribed to it. (Now, if you want to talk about the negative influence on morality and ethics, that's another matter, but that doesn't have enough to do with the bureaucratic structure or policies to make legislating something make enough difference.