the root "cause" of the problem is that the money spent on education does not produce profit (to fund the endeavour). It is reliant on a taxation scheme, which means the source of funding is adversarial to the payment of wages.
Private schools _do_ align the profit motives, but it also breaks the social good that free public education has. I dunno how one can solve this problem.
The only way it makes sense financially to teach at a private school is if you have kids you want to go there. Many schools will do reduced or even free tuition for teachers' kids. It's relatively common for private school teachers to either be early retirees from a more lucrative field or have a spouse that works.
That said, many private school teachers do it because they have more flexibility in designing a curriculum, are much less likely to encounter disruptive students, etc. Private schools also don't actually do 180 days. So it is a more enjoyable job day to day for sure.
>California has more than 1,000 school districts and 300,000 teachers, yet only 667 dismissal cases were filed with the Office of Administrative Hearings between January 2003 and March 2012, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District”s chief labor and employment counsel, Alex Molina. Only 130 of those actually got to the hearing stage, and 82 resulted in dismissals — fewer than 10 a year.
https://www.willitsnews.com/2013/01/26/firing-a-tenured-teac...
Private schools
- a lot less paperwork and mind bending BS. - flexibility is higher. Hey, we're going to teach outside on stumps during the pandemic -> no problem. This is with most things. That said private schools tended to stay open with modifications (so if you didn't want that public school would be better to be at to check out during pandemic). - Teacher has a lot of authority in their class. - Teachers / teacher aids etc that don't work out, pretty simple process not to bring them back for the following year - so peer group tends to enjoy working with each other. - You don't have to wade through the massive teacher certification processes necessarily. - Admin often has your back on discipline issues.
Some downsides too. - You can be let go easily if school feels its not working out (practically, if you have things covered its hard enough to find teachers they will work to keep you). - Pay is lower. - Expectations can be higher at good schools ie, you might need a masters etc. - Quality of programs varies WILDLY!
It’s like saying home mortgages are free money because they’re also partially backed by the fed.
Your analogy to mortgages is right on, but you've drawn the wrong conclusions. Fed-backed mortgages absolutely functioned as free money. Because the risk of unqualified borrowers was assumed by the government and by opaque, byzantine, and corrupt securitization schemes, banks were incentivized to hand over money to people who weren't able to pay it back.
This was, in every sense that matters, "free money". And it led directly to a financial crisis that many millions of people have never fully recovered from.
This is an often flouted myth. Football pays for itself and then some. There's more money in education, per capita, inflation adjusted, then there ever has been ever.
It's not a money problem, and it's not a sports problem.
The problem with this approach for public schools in the US is that there are multiple taxing authorities involved in determining how much $$$ gets attached to a student, and most of it comes from local property taxes.
The biggest factors that contribute to student academic outcomes are household income and parental education levels.
Private schools as having a superior educational experience is really about being from wealthier households than it does about better teachers.