Well, I think it's important to start with an ounce of sympathy, as it builds understanding. Public schools are run by legislatures and school boards and the li

Well, I think it's important to start with an ounce of sympathy, as it builds understanding. Public schools are run by legislatures and school boards and the like, typically being reviewed by annual-at-best election (with crap turnout, for races that few will actually follow, and many of the advantages of incumbency available. The decision-makers are not incentivized to care very much about the quality of their decisions. Moreover, they're probably the only employers in the county (maybe the whole state) and the entire business has ultra-long highly-scheduled hiring cycles -- none of this "can you start tomorrow?" business like you get in tech. That is a recipe whereby good performance is not linked to good pay at all and has very high potential for abuse. Would you trust someone employed by that sort of a bureaucracy to evaluate your performance at your job? I'd prefer not to, myself. So there are a few ways to approach this. Teachers could just sit there and take it -- you can understand why they don't care to do so, surely. We could structure the system to have a lot of objective evaluations to curb abuses -- an approach still fraught with many issues (standardized tests and certificates which fail to capture many of the most important aspects of pedagogy). As a final set of options, we could either try to ameliorate some of the worst of all this by restructuring the system to have more options and employers for teachers (charter schools, private schools, etc), or we could double down on the status quo while avoiding any evaluations on teaching whatsoever, leaving failing schools in place to ruin the lives of entire generations of students (blaming either Funding or Parents). It is mostly in the choice of the last option over the penultimate option that there is a major problem -- teachers' unions paying dues to spend on the election cycle to elect union-friendly politicians. This means that the right sort of incumbent essentially gets to spend tax money on his own campaign, and it goes downhill from there into an orgy of corruption, power games, and detachment from responsibility -- aka "politics".