I'm sure the answer is complicated.
Finland requires a graduate degree and (I think) a couple of years of on-the-job training in order to be allowed to teach at schools. In America, applying the same standards would mean that the prospective teacher not only has a significant amount of student debt, but would then also be pretty slow about paying it off. In that situation, why not aim for a better-paying job to begin with? It's not that teacher pay is low relative to the average wage in the US, it's low relative to what a college degree can get you.
For similar reasons, France can pay its doctors less than America and still have them be happier with the system.
In short, the US needs to spend more to pay people in high-skill professions because of higher inequality; also, other countries spend money on things that are not accounted for under primary and secondary education (such as free tuition), but later help with keeping down costs.
I'll note that education spending does not in and of itself fix the problem. There are plenty of affluent countries that perform poorly on the PISA. Attracting qualified teachers is only part of any solution. If you can't attract them through pay (which in principle is possible, not everybody wants to be rich), then the job needs to have perks to make up for it; but the soul-destroying bureaucracy of NCLB is pretty much the opposite.
People keep saying this, but they leave out the fact that it's not spent equally in all places. In poor neighborhoods, the schools there do NOT get the same amount of funding as they do in wealthier American nieghborhoods.
A friend of mine taught in a poor nieghborhood. She and I had to buy books and supplies for the kids because the damn school was so underfunded.
It's hard to follow your jumbled sentence. However, it appears you're implying low income areas get the most funding.
That's a right-wing myth that's spewed from places like the Heritage Foundation when they attempt to profitably indoctrinate the public into privatizing schools, etc.
The truth of the matter is The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.
http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...
So, if we are to examine the realities of the situation, we find that the kids with special needs who desperately need more funding -- often get less.
Also, if you've ever had personal experience within schools located in low-income neighborhoods as many teachers and myself have had, you'd know this very directly.
You can certainly find anomalies, but to prop up anomalies as the norm reeks of agenda instead of truth-seeking.
I should also mention that I agree that funding alone certainly isn't the only issue. How the funding is applied is very important as well. However, when funding is woefully short in the first place and kids don't have the materials and supplies they need for a proper education, we have a core problem there.
One major example is special-needs: a single kid who needs an aid or therapist drives up the average massively but that spending doesn't benefit their classmates at all, and urban districts tend to have more of them for various reasons. (This is also an interesting factor in the charter school debate: few of the accusations about cherry-picking students note that some cities don't give the charters the same extra funding for support services, creating a massive penalty for admitting each student)
E.g., some private high schools (for the rich-rich) charge up to $30k and more, that's less than a lot of really good universities for goodness sake.
Or, to take it further, it's quite likely a Veblen good: because only families that can shrug at $30,000 a year for private school will be going there, your kid will only associate with other rich kids, creating valuable romantic and professional networks.
[1] http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/stud...
Also, The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools overall spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.
[2] http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...
In other words, I'm sure the right-wing can cherry-pick anomalies (like they do with climate change, etc. and look like fools throwing snowballs on the Senate floor [3]) while disingenuously attempting to prop anomalies as "the norm", but the greater reality is that low-income areas tend to get less funding for students overall -- and, it's a problem.
[3] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-jim-inhofe-throws-snowbal...