ataglance wrote:" But, there is a very extensive weed-out process that also isn't in place in most private sector jobs."
The "weed out process" in the real world is called EVERY FREAKING DAY!!! You dont work X years then get a guaranteed job. What world do you live in?
Really, there's no job security at all in the "real" business world? Every day you are working with your job on the line? Sounds like hell to me.
Most people I know in the business world are not working scared like this. They feel like if they are doing a reasonable job, they have relatively good security. Believe me, there are ways of running bad teachers off, and schools do it all the time.
Probably I should stop posting on this thread, but again the criticisms of the teaching world seem to me to be false on two fronts. First, there is this strange conception that businesses are successful because they create highly competitive job environments. Obviously, this is not the case in all businesses, and it seems to me that the best businesses would have collaborative job environments.
Then, compounding the error, teaching is compared with this false picture of the "real world" by simply inverting this picture and assuming that schools have "no accountability," "no competitiveness," etc., etc.
Really, it's just a strange way to think -- totally ideological and unrelated to any concrete realities in the business world or educational world.
Old college prof has done a good job pointing to some reasons why we would want to structure educational institutions differently from business institutions. But I think to have a really fruitful conversation about how these institutions ought to be similar or different, the critics of schooling as it exists ought at least be a bit more reflective about what makes business institutions work beyond vague gestures towards "fear of losing one's job" and the "desire to be paid a lot of money."