being female definitely had its advantages; a girl could take a year off before deciding what to do with her life, and not have to worry about being drafted into the Army and shipped off to Indo-China to either kill or be killed.

Boys, on the other hand, had less of a choice back then; it was either go to college straight out of high school or be drafted, and get shipped off to Southeast Asia to kill or be killed.

I wonder about the causality for that last data point.  Did teachers suddenly start to shape up out of fear for their jobs?  Did the likely massive beaurocratic upheaval at the board and district level give them a sense of freedom to teach what and how they wanted?  Did the bad ones simply decide not to return to teaching after Katrina (not sure when the union was busted up)?

I would like to add some thoughts to the problems facing the educational system.

1. Teachers are overworked and underpaid.  They have little time or incentive to  work on improving their methods.  The few training sessions they do attend tend to be wastes of time based on generalities.

2. The level of education required to be certified to teach at any level is disproportionately high compared to teachers' level of income.  There are perks like summer vacations and better job security compared to say, waitrissing, but I believe the "labor of love" aspect is what keeps salaries down.  Teaching, like many health professions such as nursing, is generally regarded as noble, rewarding work.

3. Education is seen as a "soft" major at every university I know of.  Educational courses are simply not that demanding, either in terms of complexity or workload.  Combine that with good employment prospects and the societal perception of a worthy career, and you can many disinterested or otherwise marginally competent people becoming teachers.  (I know there are probably teachers posting in this thread.  If so, my observation is not addressed to you, simply because you at least care enough to blog about it.  And both my parents are teachers, which is even better than having black friends!).

So, we have a demanding, highly stressful, underpaid profession that tends to attract underachievers.  It's no wonder teachers want to form unions.  It's no wonder these unions want to keep things as rigid and uniform as possible; they have a lot of semi-competent members to protect and the good ones are too busy to deal with union matters anyway.

My ideas:

1. More merit pay for teachers, but adjusted to supply/demand for teaching certain subjects and the importance to student development .  A fifth-grader's career path will survive having a mean art teacher.  But a ninth grader who never gets the hang of algebra because the math teacher stopped caring will effectively be shut out of most scientific disciplines.  If it were added as a supplement (teachers being currently underpaid) to the current negociated contracts maybe the unions would bite.

2. Make educational degrees much more demanding.  There are plenty of other bird majors, but none that lead directly to a professional career that I can think of.  Occupational therapy, accounting and engineering (to name a few) are all far more demanding.  Make sure teachers actually can "do" before they teach.

3. Make sure academic institutions are much more vigilent in hiring and evaluating teachers.  There are ways of getting rid of the bad ones, unionized or not, but they usually involve several procedural steps, warnings, opportunities for remediation and counseling that too many schools don't bother with.  So they get stuck with the bad teachers mailing it in, harming the students' career prospects and depressing morale for the good teachers.  Managerial laziness can be as big a problem as inflexible unions and bad teachers.