Become an administrator…they don’t need any supplies and they never have to care about educating kids. I heard the pay is better, especially if you can find a building to work in that doesn’t have to put up with students or those annoying bells.

It’s certainly true, I suppose, that you’d lose fewer teachers if you didn’t treat them like chattel. It’s also true, perhaps, that people who can tough it through the awful conditions might have a little something extra to offer kids.

Your idea is profoundly stupid.

Where I come from, we’re taught to divide the problem into smaller parts, then subdivide as necessary, then solve the smallest problems first. Perhaps each school should be independent. Abolish all the large, cumbersome, unreformable national and state schools, agencies, departments, etc., allowing each school to decide all things for itself. Perhaps several real solutions will arise that can be copied. Just imagine: no more teacher’s colleges; no more departments of education; no more education departments, no more state school boards… it’s win-win.

- you could actually ask the school secretary for pencils, pens, or markers, and not be disrespected
- you could leave school without referring a fight
- you could have days when you actually were able to finish a lab not interrupted by a fire alarm
- administrators would come into your classroom without having to, and would stay to actually evaluate you (I once went 12 years without an evaluation – it would have been nice to have feedback)
- the expected student response to a direction wasn’t “FU”
- you could meet with parents/family members who didn’t have ankle bracelets/were not detained by the metal detector/were not chemically impaired
- kids came in with some skills/knowledge, not just entered because they were too big for the middle school
- a referral to special ed was handled, not filed in the terminal file
- assaults were taken care of, not swept under the rug

The plus side? You actually started to feel like a teacher.
The minus side? You were held accountable for the first time in your career.
The plus side? Tremendous growth as a teacher.
The minus side? A lot more oversight in the classroom. The days of closing the door and doing whatever you wanted were over.

For teachers who have had it with the ridiculously large bureaucracy of over-paid overlords who did squat, it could be great.

For rebels and renegades, not necessarily. In poor schools, you could carve out a tiny kingdom, and do what you thought best. Some thrived in that autonomy. Others withered.