Public school budgets are set of course by property taxes. If you teach in a rich district, you get paid more. If you teach in a poor district, you get paid less. The way public schools are funded helps keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.
Unfortunately, the political clout is held by the rich who want their tax money to go only to their children and not those other children (or "those othered children" if you like). Even though, if we switched to a more equal funding model for public schools, we'd see improvements in the wealth gap and society in general within a generation or two.
That depends on the state. In California, most school districts have their budgets set by the state funding formula which provides state funding above the local property tax revenues. There are a handful of school districts where local property tax revenue provides more than the state formula, although I haven't been able to find a list of those districts recently.
The California funding system was in place since 1972 (with major changes in 2013). Have we seen improvements in the wealth gap and society in general?
Your comment was that equalizing funding would make society better; my question is, given that funding has been mostly equalized in California, is society better?
In Washington state, funding for basic education is apportioned from state revenues; local districts can raise taxes for enrichment, but there's a cap, and state funds are provided if local taxes don't meet a minimum. I'm not familiar with other states, but there have been several court cases where states were forced to reform systems that relied on local property tax [1]; and I'd imagine many states would have changed their systems after seeing those results, rather than waiting for their own case.
[1] https://edeq.stanford.edu/sections/section-4-lawsuits/landma...
If you want teachers to be paid more, increase the requirements to be a teacher. I’m a proponent of requiring at least n years experience in real world work, plus education in a hard science or trade.
Not everything can be looked at from a macro econ 101 supply and demand take; the real world is much more complicated than that.
ie. I'm saying that we don't have to put our hopes in the basket of hoping that economic pressures force higher wages if we make teachers less prevalent; we can simply pay them more.
Not everything follows the rules of capitalism, especially when public school teachers are paid by the government. There are giant teacher shortages across many locales in the US, so according to you we should see skyrocketing teacher pay, but that hasn't happened (pay has gone up in some locales but nowhere near the amount needed to fix teacher shortages).
Trite as it may be to say, there's an obvious value to attracting a larger amount of people to teaching, it's just hard to quantify and takes longer than most politicians' term limits to see the larger benefits.
And in communism value is defined as what will get you promoted.
And in autocracy value is loyalty to the party line
And in Neo-Nazism value is what kills the most Jews
And so on and so forth, let's not pretend that people making short sighted decisions for personal gain is limited to a single economic system it may be more visible or exactrebated by one system or another but it isn't like Lusheynkinism was pushed because it helped the students of the USSR better feed their people.
One could suggest the opposite problem, we don't have enough markets in eduction and could do more with charters and vouchers, or programs like magnet schools.
Education certainly produces community value. Moving around what column the cost and benefits should be attributed to is a kind of social gerrymandering.
It's a function of ideology and power asymmetry. A well educated populace will of course be better off.
You're not going to find out why police make twice as much as teachers with neoliberal economics. Fabulists depict things this way to remove human agency and make specific legislative and policy decisions take on the authority of natural law, as if it's a scientific absolute.
It's just a slight of hand. All these things can be changed and the sky will not fall.
The voters are the customers.
"We can't hire enough teachers" -> "Let's reduce the requirements" -> "These teachers aren't very good or qualified, there's no reason to give them a raise" -> "We can't hire enough teachers!"
Since private schools are not subject to these attacks, their salaries would not be lowered by these attacks, making them relatively higher.
But this isn't helpful. Those need to be normalized by the median by country and then expressed in some deviation metric to get a real idea.
Whereas with a software developer especially at small orgs their ability is easier to measure and evaluate.
In any case, the measure for teachers should not be "how hard is the job" but rather "how important is the outcome". It might be easy enough to replace a teacher without raising the salary (another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide), but could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money?
There's a difference between difficulty and exertion.
> how important is the outcome
It's pretty damn important that the garbage man comes and collects the trash every week, but we don't pay him the marginal value of trash collection to the county.
> another assertion I have issues with - there are rampant teacher shortages nationwide
I actually agree that the market doesn't seem to be clearing due to stingy education departments and state government. We should probably break their monopsony power by privatizing education.
> could you not be potentially getting a better teacher and having broadly positive effects on society if you're offering more money
If you want to make the argument we should fire all the current teachers and replace them with people who would otherwise be accountants or actuaries or software engineers, I'd be amenable to the argument.
According to the BLS garbage collectors have a median annual wage of $ 42,780[1] whereas elementary school teachers have a median annual wage of $61,400[2].
[1]https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537081.htm
[2]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kinde...
If the state is still paying, they're still going to be stingy.
A private school has roughly the same administrative staff as a public school. Their buildings may be a little bit less expensive, as they probably can get away with less ADA accessibility. They probably don't pay into pensions and may not provide as nice of health care, so they may be able to move more of total comp into salaries, but they may also compensate their board members more. Word on the street is private school teachers get paid less and have less due process, but also have less stringent degree requirements and fewer mandates in their classroom. But they also get a lot more parental engagement, and a rather different cohort of students.
Even though I disagree with you I can see where you're coming from with this sentence, but: the impact is HUGE. The impact of good teachers on society cannot be overstated. It's an amazing ROI and everything we can do to further the education of humankind is worth doing.
Programming (mostly) isn't that hard as well, compare software engineering with electronics engineering, for example, but the impact is huge: that's why you're probably well paid to do it and your company makes your life really easy, with all the bells and whistles to make you happy.
More people could be trained to program, especially in a casual way many more (spreadsheet formulas, low-code forms or glue) but working as mentor in high-school CS programs, I've been surprised in both directions. There are a bunch of bright people out there that could move into programming with just a boost to their training to enable them to bootstrap further ... and there are lots of people that just don't have the mindset. Abstract reasoning or modeling the world is just not something they are capable of doing without intense concentration, if that. It just doesn't come naturally to these people.