California teachers earned $67K on avearge in Calif in 2011. Note that this is for 9 months of work. Except in the major cities, teachers often out-earn the income of the parents of all their students. And they benefit from a system in which they can never be fired for their performance and which gives them comparatively good retirement benefits.

Focusing strictly on California, it has the lowest scholastic scores of all states. Despite many efforts to improve schools, fewer than 10 teachers have been fired during the last two years for poor performance. That's out of a population of 275,000 teachers. Schools simply view it as impossible to fire for cause[1].

This ruling has been a long time coming.

[1] http://voiceofsandiego.org/2014/06/10/the-most-blistering-fi...

What is your definition of a huge classroom?

The number of public school teachers has increased by a larger percentage than the number of public school students over the past 10 years, resulting in declines in the pupil/teacher ratio. In fall 2002, the number of public school pupils per teacher was 15.9, compared with a projected number of 15.2 public school pupils per teacher in fall 2012. [1]

Of course I understand that some districts are different than others, and that this probably includes teachers that teach music, gym, and other classes, but still, there are more teachers per student now than there has been over the past few decades, meaning that even if classrooms are the same size as before, teachers must be getting more free time during the day to catch up on grading/admin work.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28