Question: **tl;dr**

Faculty don't think teaching is as important as their other responsibilities; how do we change that?

**Long version**

I've been working in academia for a long time and whenever I see instructors half-assing their teaching the go to excuses are that they have no time, or that it doesn't get any respect/grants/promotion/tenure/etc. I don't doubt they're busy, and I know departments don't typically reward teaching excellence (or punish teaching mediocrity...) but the students are suffering as a result.

How can we (faculty that care about teaching and staff supporting faculty) change this situation? What can we do short-term to make faculty care about teaching *now* and what can we do long-term to make departments care about excellence in teaching, and not just in research?

*Note:* I'm aware research brings in money. Keep in mind most faculty are adjuncts who aren't doing research but still have tenured research faculty that don't care about teaching as their role models.

Answer: 
Putting in place a better system for evaluating teaching than today's student evaluation forms would be a good start. Getting serious about the assessment of student learning outcomes (rather than simply assigning grades) would also be extremely helpful.
You don't hire people who don't take teaching seriously, and if you do happen to hire them accidentally, you deny them tenure and kick them out.

More generally, you reward those who take teaching seriously and/or punish those who don't. This means you give the former time (by reducing the number of classes they have to teach), money (by paying them more, giving them department funds for research, whatever), and/or other perks (nice office, free parking pass, first dibs on teaching the particular classes they'd most like to teach, whatever), and you don't give those things to the latter.