Within a thread at Hacker News, I encountered the following example from the wild of the bureaucracy of government schools driving out good teachers and keeping bad:

... The professional development activities and courses that meet the [professional standards] requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard.

When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades.

... In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads. [bold added]

In a fully free educational market, parents will send their children to the school that best combines a price they can afford with the best evidence they can see that their children will learn things there, and succeed in life. This means that parents and schools would have objective ways to gauge whether their approaches to education are succeeding, and will reward/be rewarded accordingly.

Government schools, isolated from this sort of feedback as they are, end up relying on bureaucratic rules instead to govern what and how they teach: Absent feedback from the real world, the rules end up being arbitrary. Is it any surprise that such a system selects for people who "don't grow out of" going with the flow, or might drive out better teachers? (The comment does not explicitly say this happens, but it is hard to imagine it not happening.)

What will such schools teach, and what kind of students will they turn out? How many will be receptive to suggestions that the educational sector should be private, just like, say, grocery stores? I'd wager few, even without the handicap of everyone being accustomed to government schooling being the norm for so long.

-- CAV