I have written several articles critical of government education, and laudatory of home schooling. (I’ve left private schools alone; their quality varies. Some are probably fully as bad as government schools, others are nearly as good as home schools, so recommending private schooling is about the same as recommending "a meal.") Usually, I use the term "educators" deliberately, to include government school teachers, school administrators, and union bosses who collect dues from the teachers and use the money to lobby legislators to pass laws that are universally protective of union members, and almost universally harmful to the children who are forcible wards of public schools.
This time, I’m not going to be vague or inclusive. I’m talking about teachers.
In the old Soviet Union, in Russia, people were paid the government-determined wage for their occupations. This wage did not take performance into account; all workers were paid the same.
There is a principle of animal behavior known to economists as the disutility of labor. According to this principle, while for survival and comfort you require certain outcomes, you will attain those outcomes with the minimum possible effort. This doesn’t mean anybody’s lazy; it means we’re smart. Cheetahs can run 70 miles per hour in short sprints, but they don’t go after the fastest gazelles. Cheetahs don’t chase gazelles to demonstrate cheetah machismo; they do it to obtain cheetah food. Hence, the slowest and/or nearest gazelles are the primary targets. Likewise, you don’t store your dishes and silverware in the garage or the master bedroom. Instead, homes are built in certain ways so that dishes and silverware are stored in the kitchen, as near as possible to the dishwasher, sink, and cooking stations. It is ding-nigh impossible to store formal wear anywhere in a modern kitchen. All of this is because people are generally not irrational, the same as cheetahs.
Taxicab drivers in old Soviet Russia were the same as you and the cheetahs. They were paid for showing up and going home at designated times. When the Politburo found that there were no taxis available on the streets, they learned that drivers were picking up their cabs on time, then going to the park and goofing off all day. So, taxi drivers were put on a quota system: For a driver to get paid his full wage, he had to show a certain minimum number of miles on his odometer at the end of every day. How did the drivers respond? The same way you and I would: They drove around the Moscow Beltway as fast as they could, and racked up the minimum mileage within an hour or two. Then they retired to the park until quitting time.
Government school teachers in the US, due to the power of their union bosses and voting bloc, have prevented legislators from passing laws that require teachers to be minimally competent in the core discipline they’re teaching. They’ve prevented teachers’ being held accountable for the progress their students make. And they do everything they can to prevent competition: They have cowed legislatures to require private schools to meet many of the same hamstringing criteria government schools meet; they’ve blocked school vouchers (which are a bad idea in the long run in that money remains under government control, but a good idea in that they threaten government teachers by increasing competition in the short run); and they’ve made life as difficult as possible for home schoolers.
According to the most basic behavioral laws that predict accurately how we’ll perform under different scenarios – laws that are obeyed by humans, all other mammals, and reptiles and bugs as well – government school teachers can always be expected to perform poorly. Government schools have held to this prediction. Mises himself would predict further that government schools would absorb increasing public money while their performance deteriorates over time, and government schools have borne out this prediction as well.
By contrast, home schoolers have every incentive to succeed. Their own children’s futures are at stake. Not insignificant is that home schoolers, as do all parents, find themselves "affirmed" (they feel pride) when their children excel. Combine the narcissistic and parental motivations with the absence of concerns over job security and union power; add to it that the narcissism and parental love will be satisfied only when the children excel; and you get what any anthropologist or economist would predict: Home schooled children fare better, both academically and socially. The data we have are consistent with the prediction.
So, while it is true that government school administrators and legislators are a big part of the problem with government education, the teachers themselves are part of the problem as well. Whenever we allow communities to require of their teachers proof of competence (and lack of criminality) beyond certification of knowledge of the latest faddish esteem theories of education, we can begin to remove blame from the teachers themselves. But with administrators, union bosses, and legislators still in the soup, the safest prediction would remain: Schooling will be all it can be only when government is entirely out of the education business.