Re:For a second straight year, school enrollment is dropping
by mannerheim on Thursday December 16, 2021 @12:47PM
(#29581220)
Per capita out-of-pocket is about $800, barely changing that number. The top 5% spend an average of $8000[0], which still puts compensation ahead of countries like New Zealand, Norway, Japan, Sweden, and Finland, and that's not even accounting for the higher income taxes many of these countries have.
As for retirement, most public school systems have extremely generous pensions. Illinois, for instance, has over ten thousand former employees with six figure pensions - not just administrators, but teachers, too.
Do you have any evidence American teachers work harder than teachers in other OECD countries? For instance, US class sizes are just under the OECD average, although this is skewed by China's unusually large class sizes, at about the middle of the pack and behind countries such as Japan, Germany, France, and Australia, and the countries with smaller class sizes aren't that much smaller. [1]
[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
[1]: http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/EDIF%2020...
What you really need is a comparison which is adjusted for both cost of living and alternative careers for comparable education. I described this as an underpaid profession because the combination of high demand, rigid schedule, and low respect is the primary reason I’ve known people to leave it.
The underfunding plays into two of those problems because teachers are asked to handler more, larger classes which ensures that everything is always close to the breaking point. The “slack” which that forces to be cut are things like personalized attention and more involved lessons.