A modest education proposal

Ned is aware that his friends in the education field are being assaulted by the knuckledrsgger crowd, who are apparently apoplectic to see any American enjoy a middle-class salary and benefit package, always excepting members of the Sneering plutocracy and the Paris Hilton Set, to whom they are content to award the lion's share of the GDP. In reply, teachers have claimed to be worked to death by the unceasing need to grade papers, homework, and tests and write assessments of hundreds of students, asserting that a typical teacher's work load amounts to sixty or seventy hours a week. Naturally, this claim falls on hollow ears, since anyone driving by a school after three P.M. is struck by the deathly quiet of it all.
And they never mention the summers "off" for some reason, nor the spring breaks and many holidays, all of which force working parents to scurry about (Ned will never say 'scramble') to find day care.
So Ned has a modest proposal: if teachers say they work seventy hours a week grading papers, evaluating students and conferring with parents, raising money for band and the like, and report after report details the sorry state of American primary and secondary education, such that our students generally fall in the bottom half of kids in developed countries, then why do they do it? What purpose does all this "assessment" serve? Apparently none. Why do they continue to spend the hours and hours each week doing this grinding work, always assuming they do of course, to no apparent end?
Ned would like to propose that teachers be assigned a forty hour work week like most everyone else, and that the school year be extended into the summer like virtually every other country on earth. Then parents, who are also taxpayers, will feel they are getting their money's worth, teachers will not be so stressed (at least during the period Sept 1-June 1 with ample breaks in between) and our children will finally be inculcated with a culture that values learning, as they will be exposed to it the entire year.