[fintstone]

No whining here. It is exactly what I signed up for. I have a great job. It is exactly what I chose to do, went to school to do, and has exactly the expected compensation. Choices have consequences....good or bad. I was just making a comparison to teachers who seem to have such a tough life (per your earlier post). Most seem quite out of touch with reality. Too bad since they are such a big influence on our children. Very few of us have the Ward Cleaver ..in at 9, home at 5 jobs. Folk who become teachers are exposed to the profession their entire life and have little room to act suprised at the hours, responsibilities, or compensation and even less to complain about others who chose different paths or expect them to happily pay a huge portion of their salaries for questionable service.
I am glad you see it as your job to educate your children...but that seem like a cop out for those of us who have no choice but pay huge money each year to have government schools educate our children. Most of the "educational time" we have with our kids is to try to counteract/unteach the anti-competition, anti-religion, procommunist teachings and sex mis-education that government schools seem to do such a good job doing..leaving little time to teach more reading, writing, and arithmetic...which they do such a poor job of.

Imagine being forced by the govt to turn over your Porsche to a shop for six to eight hours a day to work on for 12 years ..pay hundreds of thousands of dollars while the mechanic called every day to whine for more money ..and remind you that fixing your car is really your responsibility. In the end...your RSR comes back looking like an AMC pacer with a Yugo engine, runs like crap, and the mechanic implies it is somehow your fault.

As far as your "measurable" question...If teaching is your business, it seems you should be able to come up with some way to measure your work. Since you claim that grades, test scores, etc are not fair measures.....why not allow the ultimate measure of any enterprise...competition? Let any parent who chooses opt out of the system and take the money (expenditure per student) to the school of their choice. You will find out real fast which schools and teacher are capable and which are not. The very fact that the schools/teachers/liberals/NEA fight this tells me that they already know the answer.

I'm sure there are plenty of capable, hard working teachers. They have nothing to fear by accountability or competition. In fact, it would seem that they would support it because it would probably make their jobs easier and increase their compensation...while weeding out their incompetent contemporaries and poorly run/operated schools and attracting better talent. Monopolies are doomed to mediocrity by design.