Parents choose to have children. Teachers do not choose to parent. That sentence is the whole border, and most of what feels wrong about modern schooling turns out to be a breach of it.
Parent is a fact of relation. It cannot be handed to someone else. To parent is a bundle of tasks, feeding, comforting, bedtimes, manners, and every one of those tasks can, in principle, be delegated. That is how the drift happens: nobody notices the relation changing hands, because it never does. Only the tasks slide, one small one at a time, and each one looks harmless on its own.
Teacher runs the opposite way. The word only really holds while the person is actually allowed to do the job. Fill a teacher’s day with data entry, tracking and form-filling instead of teaching, and it does not just make them busy, it starts to dissolve the reason they became a teacher in the first place.
Something belongs inside a school only if it passes three tests. It needs genuine teaching, not merely "it matters", since swimming matters enormously and still fails this test: what swimming needs is water, time and money, not a classroom. It is the work teachers actually joined to do. And it can be shown through a child’s real work, not converted into evidence for an audit.
Bureaucracy, literally rule by desks, has no verb of its own. Its only function is generating tasks for other people to carry out: evidencing, tracking, moderating. A desk cannot read a child, so it asks for the child to be turned into something it can read instead, a mark, a level, a data point. That conversion is where most of what feels wrong in schools actually comes from, and it is worth saying plainly rather than around the houses.
There is a child in front of a teacher today who is hungry, unwashed or struggling, and society will not have fixed itself by Friday. No decent school turns away from that child, and this plan does not ask any school to.
The rule is: catch the child, and log the catch. Schools as a last resort, always. As a first resort, never. And never silently, because every duty quietly shifted onto schools is a receipt for something society chose not to pay for properly elsewhere. Read the receipts. Fix what they record. Do not simply build them into the timetable and move on.
This has been tried before, twice, at national scale, and it failed both times in the same way. England paid teachers by test results starting in 1862. It narrowed everything to what would be tested, taught children to perform for inspectors, demoralised the profession, and was eventually abandoned as a proven failure, only to be rebuilt with computers a century later.
America tested every child every year for two decades with penalties attached to the results. Teaching narrowed to the test. In some places, adults were criminally convicted for altering children’s wrong answers to protect their school’s score. Learning barely moved. The desk has been given every chance, on two continents, across two centuries. It cannot read children into learning.
The country that gets this closest to right, Finland, spent twenty years first making teaching a serious, selective profession, one that now turns away roughly nine in ten applicants, and only removed the inspectors once the profession had earned that trust. The order matters. Trust given to an under-trained profession collapses. Training given without eventual trust just produces better-qualified clerks.