Yet, unlike with most other professions, the government guarantees that those glorified daycare jobs will continue to exist. Why should these jobs pay well?
I'm pretty sure my K-12 education (public school) and college (private university) were both above average, but I definitely learned _something_ from at least a few classes every year in K-12, and at least could tell you what sorts of things I've forgotten from them. Meanwhile, I couldn't tell you what about half of my college classes were even _supposed_ to have taught, shortly before graduation, despite passing all of them with (almost all) high marks.
What if the guy managing your retirement fund lost 85% of your money, would you stick with him because you got to keep at least some of it?
> Meanwhile, I couldn't tell you what about half of my college classes were even _supposed_ to have taught, shortly before graduation, despite passing all of them with (almost all) high marks.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here?
Primary and secondary public education often fails to provide basic literacy competence. As a result, a high-school diploma isn't worth much, but the right college degree statistically is worth even the absurd prices that are now being paid for them.
> This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so.
The government can pay for it without running it, see the Swedish model and the voucher system, which has resulted in improvements. However, teacher unions are obviously against this. They fear their jobs will be less secure if most parents had a real choice in where to enroll their children.
in all seriousness, i'd love for the US government to throw serious cash at teachers' salaries. it's basically a wise investment in the country's future. so what if they're daycare teachers? we have plenty of $ to spend on providing a safe place and food for our children in the US for 8 hours a day. a lot of the money is spent on the backend on welfare or prisons anyway, so it's probably not very expensive when the externalities are factored in.
looking outside the US, i think Finland understood they had no resources other than timber, snow, and their population and started tooling up their educational system, to the tune of high salaries/prestige/perks or something for teachers (someone will correct me here). anyway, they do really well on int'l standardized tests (yes this is not ideal, but is useful at least as a relative measurement) and seem to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, low GINI, etc.
if it weren't so darned cold and dark seasonally, i'd be interested in relocating there for the sake of my children's education.
Did you, in all honesty, go through the public school system and came out with an "yeah we need more like that"? Seriously?
> in all seriousness, i'd love for the US government to throw serious cash at teachers' salaries. it's basically a wise investment in the country's future.
You really believe that?
> so what if they're daycare teachers? we have plenty of $ to spend on providing a safe place and food for our children in the US for 8 hours a day.
Schools, a safe place? Where did even you go to school?
> a lot of the money is spent on the backend on welfare or prisons anyway, so it's probably not very expensive when the externalities are factored in.
I'm pretty sure most of the prison inmates had their share of public education.
> Finland
You can't just pick your favorite nordic country and act like it is representative of anything. What about France? Total free government education and massive youth unemployment. What about Spain? Everyone is running around with one or more degrees, but no job.
And besides, we have that old HN saw: "If you can't hire anyone, you aren't paying enough.". Well, that coin has another side: "If you're hiring lots of people, you're paying enough.".
Where did you go to school? Sounds like a bad one.