I'm not sure why you should find the comment amusing, and you haven't stated what it is, but I'll break it down for you.
"Teachers get paid simply for standing in front of a class".
Statistically, throughout England and Wales, more than one fifth of lessons aren't delivered by someone qualified in the subject. That means, in reality, that the teacher who does deliver the lesson material is often either simply 'minding' the class or 'muddling through'. Either way, they're being paid simply for standing in front of the class.
Now, that statistic doesn't take into account the 55% absence rate among staff that's been rising slightly, year-on-year, and in most schools they employ substitute staff to cope with these absences. The social and interpersonal dynamics in teaching mean it's all but impossible for a substitute teacher to do anything with the class in terms of actual teaching, so they end up 'minding' the class. In other words, they're paid for simply standing in front of a class.
This becomes more of an issue when you take into account in-service training. Almost all staff are given time off for in-service training - and much of it is compulsory, such as GCSE standardisation meetings, and so on. In that event, all their classes are covered by substitute staff, who are paid for simply standing in front of a class.
I could go on, mentioning in-school meetings, classroom issues, and so on, but I hope you get the point.
The second part of what I said was
"There's little to no check on the quality of what they deliver. "
Here's where it becomes more worrying. The percentage of FTE (Full Time Equivalent) teachers with QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) has been steadily falling for some years. From the Government's own statistics "Secondary schools employ the majority of the 20,300 FTE teachers without QTS; 11.5 thousand (57 per cent). Primary schools employ 5.9 thousand teachers without QTS (29 per cent) and the remainder work in special schools or are employed directly by local authorities."
Now, the situation is that when those who are attempting to elevate the quality of teaching visit or assess these people they can't effectively do anything, since they're employed in the full awareness that they're not holding QTS. So in that instance "There's little to no check on the quality of what they deliver".
If we then examine the average, fully subject-qualified teacher standing in front of their class one might imagine that they deliver a lesson that excites, enthuses, stimulates and educates every time they do. Sadly, the reality is anything but. Part of that has to do with the ways in which schools are organised; Secondary schools, for instance, often work under a structure which actively denies children and staff the opportunities to receive and deliver high quality education. There are many reasons for this, but the outcome is the same: a poorer quality education than the children deserve.
In England children in Secondary schools pupils
on average spend between six and six and a half hours per day in school. But let's look at that. If we take the timetable of a school rated as 'Good'. then we see it has 6 x 50 minutes periods (lessons) per day. Which sounds reasonably encouraging, because we can assume the kids are getting at least 5 hours education per day. You might notice that's down significantly from the 6.5 hours they spend actually in school.
So then we look at the actual lessons. In a typical day at least one lesson will be delivered by a sub. Yes - work might be set by the teacher who's missing, while the sub is paid for simply standing in front of the class, but it's not the same as being taught.
So now we're down to 4 hours 10 mins. But in Secondary schools children move from room to room and, in the larger schools, that takes time. Allowing for a minimum transition time between each of the 6 scheduled lessons, it can eat up around 40 minutes per day, simply moving along corridors, lining up outside classrooms, waiting for lessons starts and so on.
So now we're down to 3 hours 30 mins in actual lessons being taught.
Bu that's not the end of it. Far from it, as the teacher in each classroom has to ensure an orderly start to the lesson, deal with the minutiae of taking a register, missing books, absences, sorting out homework and stopping the children who enjoy challenging staff from disrupting the class for everyone else. All that easily adds another 30 - 45 mins per day onto the non-teaching bit.
So now we're down to under 3 hours of actual taught lessons and I haven't even started on fire drills, games lessons, PE lessons, potential disruption and so on.
Once we finally get into the classroom where we can actually learn something the teacher has to arrange the lesson to allow for the 30 or so individuals of varying ability they have to teach. So how is the quality monitored?
Well, there's actually no universal agreement as to what makes a high quality lesson. There are a lot of terms thrown around. of course, buyt they're often fairly meaningless when examined in the real-world context. Since there's no agreement, OFSTED and others have drawn up 'recommendations', but all too often those are simply book-keeping measures which don't even start to deal with quality of teaching.
I could go on but I hope what I said is now clearer. The sad thing is that excellent teachers do exist, but all too often they're driven out of the job by the increasing pressures to maintain the books.