Teaching is not in any sense a competitive economy, nor should it be.
Competition does not make for good education. It makes for an environment in which only one is a winner and all the rest are losers.
A good education requires cooperation, not competition. It is not and never will be a race to see who knows more than whom.
Education can be measured against only one standard: ignorance.
As a professional educator, I know that the only place in a school for competition is possibly varsity sports, and that only in the sense that it builds a loyalty to the institution for some people to whom a ball is the only thing they understand. Sports are mostly good exercise, though some (basketball, track, soccer) are far superior to others (hockey, football, in which serious injuries and expensive equipment costs can outweigh the benefits of exercise) and baseball, in which over half the players are required to just loiter around and wait rather than exercise.
A teacher who is told he will be fired unless he does everything in some prescribed way, which is what happens when some bozo decides on "standards", will never try any new techniques and no one who is constantly threatened with being fired will be able to teach in any effective way.
My main objection to war is that it is exceedingly costly in lives and treasure. I make no claims to being an expert in strategy, unless it is really obvious, as was Rumsfeld's insufficient force resulting in disaster. The real pros already knew this, and told him so.
If you would not join a union, this tells me that you are incapable of cooperating in any meaningful way with your fellow me, and definitely do not belong in education.
Even an army requires cooperation. Actually, an army demands cooperation. But Armies are about brute force and destruction, and education is about training each person to realize his highest potential. Brute force and destruction are rarely a part of any sort of decent education.
One example would be General Petraeus, who dared to actually think what he was doing through in Iraq, and managed to cooperate with the locals, rather than just do the easy thing and scare the crap out of them. He used his head. The other officers did only as they were told, and enjoyed little or no success. The army is not a place where creative thought is generally considered a positive thing.
I would say that by and large, our best officers are far better at getting their goals accomplished than our dummy politicians. The only trouble is that like Colin Powell, Shalikashvili and the Admiral Fallon, they are too often thrown out for being too competent.
