re: Who garners more respect as an educator:the high school teacher or college prof?

I've done both. Teaching is a trade, like plumbing. You learn the mechanics of conveying information and controlling the learning environment over time. The ones who want to be good at it are always tweaking and revising their methods and materials.

That said, there's absolutely no substitute for content mastery and the quickest way to sink a ship is for it to become obvious to the class that you don't know the subject that well. On the other when the class becomes aware that you do, in fact, know the subject backwards and forwards, that can draw them into the course, get them interested and, in turn, make the transfer of information more efficient.

Good high school teachers probably have a greater chance to make an impact on students' lives. Unfortunately, the number of teachers who hold their students' feet to fire and have administrations that support them challenging the students is very, very low. I teach mostly freshmen and sophomores at an SEC school and we have to spend a good bit of time teaching them study skills and reading tactics just so they can complete the course - and these are generally students who were in the upper 20% of their high school classes. It's part of the reason why we put so much weight on the ACT/SAT -- the GPAs are now, for the most part, complete shite as a measure of your intellectual ability/achievement because they've watered them down for political/social/feel-good reasons.

I will say this, though: I'm not a huge fan of open-ended tenure because I've seen way too many of my colleagues get it and then sit on their asses for twenty years, using the shield of tenure as an excuse for acting like little bitches to the dean, president, and chancellor, kind of like a shite arse kid yelling at people from behind a fence.