This involves paying teachers paying more and treating them with respect? Nah, lets have endless conversations about how whether we should not learn math at all!
That issue is highly political though. Even when setting aside the issue of selling to voters a pay raise for teachers. Good math teachers are specialists with a math education. To attract them to teaching you’re going to have to pay them more than other teachers. How do you sell that, politically, to teachers’ unions?
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on with non-specialist teachers teaching math. They’re teaching bad habits and passing on their own math anxiety to students but if you confront them about it they get very defensive and start talking about school funding and textbooks and materials and computers.
The truth is: that’s all bunk. Third world countries are better at teaching math. They don’t get distracted with computers and they don’t waste time and money redesigning the curriculum and printing new textbooks all the time. They teach math in the old, straightforward style and emphasize practice.
Paying english teachers less also means you get bad english teachers that are bad at teaching critical reading (which..yikes!), so I don't really see the point of that pay discrimination.
I would absolutely advocate for removing administrative bloat, but we should be recruiting teachers like tech workers.
I haven't seen any evidence that any particular teaching method delivers tangible improvements in critical thinking skills over the school term. Do you know of any? It's important to measure skills at the beginning and end of a term (and a followup years later) in order to show improvements at the individual level. Otherwise you risk selecting for students' prior ability.
As far as I know, professions like teaching, nursing etc. don't work that way. I personally know about 3 teachers who genuinely cared about their students but could not survive on teacher salaries (2 are now real estate agents and miss their kids :/).
More money isn't the solution.
Have you been to the US? Because most people here don't respect teachers. And we pay teachers almost nothing.
That is largely not true, though certainly true in some cases. Teacher salaries are set by the local school district and range from "reasonable" to "not great".
Overall, teachers make about $51,000/year while bachelor's degree holders as a whole make about $59,600/year. Against that, you have to recognize that the teacher pay is for nine months, while the bachelor's degree number is for twelve months. If the typical bachelor's degree holder worked only nine months, one would expect their salary to be about $44,700, considerably less than the typical teacher.
Sources:
Or do you believe that if the profession were more respected, it would attract a better, more qualified class of teacher, who could then better educate the students?
And, to be clear, I think teachers are generally qualified. Math just represents a very acute failure mode of our education system.
It seems like paying the same people more money to do the same job won't change outcomes in any meaningful way. Why would anyone expect it to? Paying teachers more in a competitive market, on the other hand, might has a dramatic impact as we might likely end up with very different teachers.