Right out of the union songbook. Sorry to disagree.
Why do you think getting rid of the current bad teachers will improve things? Where, how do you think we can get better ones? Why do you think the new ones will be better? What has changed to attract a better quality of teacher than what we got 20 years ago?
You have to start somewhere; IQ testing for teachers and higher qualifications without pre-existing higher pay isn’t going to attract better teachers, it’s just going to drive more people away from the profession. Like it or not, the societal value of most professions is judged by the salaries they make, and teachers are typically low paid in relation to many others.
I have a pet theory… and it is that back in the day, before women were accepted in most professions, they basically had 2 degreed professions that were widely open to them- teaching and nursing, so in essence, a few outliers became doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc… but most college women became either teachers or nurses.
Then later on, the combination of women’s acceptance in the professional workplace and the devaluation of the bachelor’s degree means that nowadays, the really competent women opt for some kind of other career, and that sub-standard students tend to opt to be teachers, leaving us with a less capable and less insightful corps of teachers.
Anecdote: I went to Texas A&M, and lived/worked as an RA in the freshman honors dorm for 4 years in the 1990s. Of about 800 honors students that I lived with in those 4 years, I can count the education majors on my fingers and toes, all of which were women (it was a co-ed dorm). Of those 400 women from the dorm, I suspect a whole lot more than 12-15 would have ended up teachers had things been like they were in the 1960s.
So the first step in my mind, would be to raise salaries significantly- like double them for new teachers, and phase in the same kind of qualifications that similar paying jobs would require, so that people in college would seriously consider teaching, since it would be lucrative, and have time off in the summer. Make it a sort of destination job, and lock them in with golden handcuffs. Right now a lot of teachers are paid at the point where quitting and switching careers doesn’t incur much if any salary penalty. Make it where they take a significant drop in pay to do something else after a few years of teaching.
And finally, extend the state’s sovereign immunity to the school districts, administrators and individual teachers. I was aghast at how skittish my mother’s school district, administrators and fellow teachers were about lawsuits filed by disgruntled parents. It was so bad that they almost couldn’t function, and everything was done with a ridiculous amount of CYA and documentation merely to prevent lawsuits. Seems to me that teachers need to teach, and not worry about whether they’re going to hurt some kid’s feelings and get sued personally as a result.