I think there is truth that contributes to the current problem regardless. Like the user below says the low salary only attracts barely competent losers that only want to exploit children for their own benefit and intentionally dumb them down while the high quality candidates end up going somewhere else.

And there is some excuse for Dennis Miller that he didn't know just how worse the gravity of the education system was. He just skimmed on the surface and used it as a material for his jokes. He was just a standup comedian after all and I bet he just heard it from someone else that was the problem. Back then nobody seems to have brought up how bad the education system was. I only heard education system is getting bad a few years after No child left behind act got implemented.