Or, hear me out, it's because they've been underfunded from the start. PTA, Volunteer Coaching, Parent involvement in fundraisers, etc. all helped make the underfunded schools of the 1990's and 2000's run smoothly despite lack of funding. The reality is that there were never enough resources in the first place, and parents used to shoulder a lot more of the burden. Parents no longer have time for these things, which when combined with an even smaller budget results in very lackluster schools. Maybe, just MAYBE, if we took the 60k signing bonus and absurd salary away from ICE and started giving it to teachers, we'd see change in a meaningful way.
It's a huge mistake to continually use the frame about the work of teachers around pay -- rather it is a terrible job.
I know a high school music teacher who's been assaulted by students multiple times. The teacher who inspired me to learn physics took me to the school after hours to see what his classroom looked like after hours and it was so stuffed with chairs that I asked "Has the fire marshal been here?" Every teacher I've known in the public schools has had times when they came home crying because of the moral injury of knowing that they can't help many of their students.
That music teacher has five years to go to retirement with a full pension but with the stress he's under I don't know if he'll make it. Private schools can pay teachers less because it's a better job to teach in private schools not least that private schools can evict the bottom 20% of students (in terms of behavior) who consume 80% of the teacher's time.
I would bet the statistics suggest no matter how much a teacher is paid, no matter how small the class size, or how fancy the school, no one can make a kid care about learning if that isn’t reinforced from the beginning at home and amongst the kids’ peers.
Obviously, education should be properly funded, and many places do not pay competitively, especially considering many teachers these days have to baby sit mentally ill kids. But the bigger problem is that the kids who can and want to excel have been deprioritized in favor of the those who can’t or don’t want to learn.
>Or, hear me out, it's because they've been underfunded from the start.
Compare the funding per student to any other country in Europe... they've been hilariously overfunded for longer than either of us have been alive.
>The reality is that there were never enough resources in the first place, a
That's not reality. That's "spin". There were always enough resources for high achievement from those capable of high achievement... but then equal amounts of money wouldn't be wasted on low achievers.
>Maybe, just MAYBE, if we took the 60k signing bonus
This is just bad math. You need how many teachers nationwide? 1 million-ish? Go ahead and split those $60k bonuses over that many teachers (and over the next 20 years), and the few tens or hundreds of dollars that it ends up being, per teacher, is supposed to make a difference?
Yeah, "underfunded schools" is a talking point that bears no relation to reality but was great for pulling at people's heartstrings, because "think of the children!" But taxpayers have learned better, because they can look at their property tax bills and see how the bulk of it goes to schools. They can look up the per-pupil cost and see that it just keeps climbing faster than pretty much anything else but health care.
They can see that the corollary talking point (schools in disadvantaged areas get less funding) is a lie too. From an MIT study: "The distribution of spending experienced by children living in poverty (figure 1a) is nearly indistinguishable from that of children not living in poverty (figure 1b)."[1] People who make that claim usually only count state and local funding, ignoring federal Title I which makes up for it.
The "underfunded schools" dog just won't hunt anymore. People who are worried about their next paycheck don't want to hear it, especially when it often comes from school administrators who make more than they do.
> if we took the 60k signing bonus and absurd salary away from ICE and started giving it to teachers, we'd see change in a meaningful way.
Give the money to the people (parents) and let them choose whether to spend it on school fundraisers or anything else.
Garbage in, garbage out. Schools are shit because inputs are poor (literally and figuratively) and inputs are poor because most people in this country lose half their paycheck to the government and interests that are in bed with government[1]. As other commenters have pointed out, the actual level of funding per student is by no means the bottleneck here.
[1] E.g. a landlord who's rent price is a reflection of constrained supply which is constrained partly by law but partly by the supply of component parts (materials, labor, design work) of competing goods which themselves are subject to yet more artificial constraints, etc, repeat infinitely)
