I'm interested in that also. I don't really see how you can compare public and private education without looking at class and the ability for the private school to select students. At the very least private school students have parents who can and will spend a significant amount of money on their kids education.

Look up rubber rooming in NY schools. Basically, they can't fire teachers with tenure (which they get relatively quickly compared to eg college professor tenure) for even gross misconduct, so they end up paying them to sit in a room doing nothing. If there isn't enough budget, they have to lay off newer teachers, even if they're doing well.

I'm not blaming them for the number of people in those rubber rooms or for the terrible administration of that school district. I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in. That drags down the average quality of teaching in the US.

That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.

EDIT: I should also note that NYC public schools are an incredibly challenging teaching environment, a lot of false accusations fly around, and I don't mean that all the teachers in the rubber rooms should be let go. I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.

> I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but is there any evidence that it is a huge problem and not isolated cases?

> That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.

The problem is not having a way to quantify what a good teacher is. Is it the one that imparts a love of learning on there students or the one that gets better test results? Is it the one in the wealthy area or the one in the poor area where kids aren't even being fed? If the students do poorly is it the teachers fault or did a teacher in a previous year skip crucial topics?

Paying good teachers more isn't possible until you can identify good teachers.

> I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.

Well there I agree, it should at least be very rare. It does sound strange to me, I don't think it's a thing in my country and even in academia tenure isn't as strong.

Sadly, I've only heard anecdotal evidence from young teachers I know, and maybe some reading I've done in the past, so I don't have any sources on hand to point to, and maybe it's isolated rather than endemic.

You're right that it's hard to quantify whether someone is a good teacher or not, but I don't think it's impossible to judge. It's probably impossible to make it a simple succinct rubric, though. Maybe it's a challenge for a universal function approximator like a neural net :-)