Inspire and grow the intelligence of the next generation? Nah, let’s sell ads and figure out how to make people spend more time on social media, getting rich in the process.
According to [1] the American people spend $14,891 per public school pupil per year. So if a single classroom has 30 students, that classroom gets $446,730 of funding.
And yet, as I understand things, American classrooms don't look like they've had $440k per year spent on them.
This thing about 'amazing teachers vs. terrible teachers' is a really, really bad mythology.
Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values.
In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish.
But the same school and teachers magically transplanted into an upper middle class neighbourhood will flourish.
America invests more as a % of GDP in education than most nations, even raw $ per student [1]
The other thing that nobody wants to contend with, is that America has a giant community of migrants, often undocumented, from very poor countries with a different culture that live in more segregated isolated communities, and form a kind of 'working class backbone', but which makes it harder for their kids to break into the middle class. The surpluses from this labour are immesurable.
California and Texas are rich at least in part because they have millions of people willing to work very cheaply in addition to millions who will work 'off the books' even more cheaply - and who do the work well because they are 'happy to be living the dream'.
PISA (OECD) standardized testing (see: 2018 and historical) shows this stark difference: Asian and White kids have done consistently well for decades. Black and Latino kids are consistently 'doing a bit better' (i.e. closing the gap), but the increase in their population offsets the net improvement and drags the average down.
The 'education' issue in the US is a giant canard. If you can get kids into good families, with good parents, stable jobs, no violence i.e. 'what you and I would normally expect in life' - those kids will do just fine in the current system as it is.
> In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish.
These two paragraphs are mutually contradictory. A high-quality, community-minded teacher is not going to want to deal with "gang violence and threats" if they aren't being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them. They've got plenty of alternatives, after all.
It's hard for me to grasp how people can really even think that way for anything but careerism - I always felt that it would be the perspective of industry, not the the community at large.
Teachers love children, and want to help, that is their vocation and calling.
For most people, money obviously matters, but it's not everything.
Generally, speaking, they are going to view children in worse conditions as a challenge and an opportunity to help, not some 'crap to contend with'.
Surely a few teachers are going to want to 'teach the best students' but that's a smaller cohort.
More broadly, yes, it can probably be a bit depressing to work in crappy schools, but they do often pay a bit extra.
But ultimately, the point is moot, because even if schools do operate 'sub optimally' in the face of non-participation from students, those same schools would pick up as the students did i.e. if you solve for the community problem, the school will be up to the task.
Bad schools are not creating these environments, it's the other way around.
The model for education works fine, just get people stable jobs, stable families, conscientious lifestyles and educational outcomes will go up.
Most people don't have 'careers' they have 'jobs' and if they can do something they want to do then that's a bonus for them.
So comp. takes a completely different kind of form there, outside the scope of what we normally consider performance/bonus oriented among professionals.
It's a bit like Nursing, a semi-socialized trade where we establish pay rates via budgets, Unions, a bit of supply and demand etc..
As to why software devs make so much, it's a simple matter of revenue per employee. Software is insanely scalable. While it is capital intensive to produce software, it is nearly free to distribute. A handful of developers can produce multi-billion dollar software programs, because the market is the entire internet (billions of people). A grade school teacher can at most teach 30 or so kids at a time.
Engineers ship results.
Pretty sure many parents would be ok with a result based comp for their kids teacher.
They're claiming an average of about $40k, and $63k at the 90th percentile, for an "entry level teacher." However, note, the shape of the distribution is really, really freaking weird, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯