I come from a teaching family and my wife was a special-ed teacher for many years; one of my constant observations, reinforced by a very competent wife and a mother who was a comprehensively horrible teacher was that there seems to be very little respect given to the job and there's very little training given in how to do it well. It's also terribly subject to politics, fads and administrative whims.

I could go on for hours, honestly. But teaching problem-solving skills was part of my wife's toolkit. Some of them worked alarmingly well on me.

For me. I meant for me.

And when doing a "push-in", say working on math skills for a group that's not getting it, sometimes she'd show the alternate strategy to the whole class. In other words, she was teaching the teacher how to teach better.

She also taught test taking strategies, like "If you don't know, the answer is "c" more often than not." She'd model conflict-resolution strategies for kids with behavior issues. If they were never going to be able to master reading, she'd teach them how to cope with not being able to read.

A master-class teacher is one who has strategies that work for different learning styles and abilities. In large classes, the best you get is "one size fits most." Lesson plan, teach to test, test, digest data, re-adjust; it could be done by an expert system running on a desktop PC.

Which might be a great idea - if you keep the teachers; that would give them time to teach.