We've arrived in a weird situation where we pay so little to teachers and yet require a high level of education, that we aren't attracting our best & brightest to the profession. I've still met some great teachers, but I've met a lot of glorified babysitters. It's infuriating.

Public school teachers get paid plenty. Where I live ~68K is the average and they get summers off. Plus tenure.

How many people here on HN would consider 68K "plenty", and what percentage have a master's degree? Or even a bachelor's?

Salary isn't based on which degrees you have, it's based on what job you're doing. It's inane to compare a computer programmer's salary to a teacher's salary.

That aside, 68k is perfectly reasonable for a job with fantastic security, summers off, lots of vacation time where you get to work with children. Also, when I started working as a programmer, my salary was ~72k which is not much more and I had no trouble living off it. Of course the ceiling is higher for me but that's the market's doing.

> summers off, lots of vacation time

This comes at the expense of having absolutely no flexibility during the school year and usually plenty of long days & weekends, and summer has things like professional development / continuing education keeping it from being a long work-free block.

It’s not bad but it’s not a compensation game changer. One other thing to remember: for a teacher, being out sick is almost as much work as a normal day. The tempo of a school year means that a lot of people need a couple weeks to unwind at the end of the year.

that only partially addresses one half of the comment though. additionally, “summers off” is a fairly common red herring that’s just designed to distract from the primary argument. this has nothing to do with time off or tenure so please stop trying to distract.

And where I live, 68k is... Probably not going to let you live in this area. :(

I'm torn. Both sides of this debate can make pretty good arguments. And I'm particularly swayed by the arguments in Case Against Education.

That said... What is the path forward? I'm just not seeing it.

IMHO, for starters, we should be subsidizing essential workers*. Indexed to cost of living.

If salary isn't over a threshold, relative to their workplace, they're eligible for subsidized housing (in a mixed-income development) and food.

That we have necessary people unable to live in the communities they serve is insane. And if we're not going to address it from the salary side, at least we can do something from the expense side.

* Where "essential worker" means any job fulfilling a social function in the local community. Teacher, nurse, police officer, firefighter etc.

I'm not sure this works. Basically, sets up dire stakes to maintain a job for as long as you can, and makes perverse incentives on the auditing of the system.

Cards on the table, I'm very keen on some sort of UBI. I also have doubts on much of the reporting I've seen surrounding it.

I further think this needs a way to both double down in access and advancement for those with access, while further increasing funding and effort for those that don't. Main belief is that success affords more and more. Such that you want to double down in success, but you also need to use more of that success to lift up everyone.

Because those teachers are publicly funded and many or even most parents cannot afford anything else.

Apologies, I meant my question mainly rhetorical. But I'm not seeing what direction this answer takes it.

The premise above was that school choice could fix things. But, for places without capital, how?

the primary argument against school choice/voucher systems is that it would implicitly recreate segregation across races and classes. there are counter arguments to this line of thinking, but that’s what i’ve heard as the primary argument against choice

Right, that argument is what I meant by places without capital. If you don't have the wealth to get your kids to a good school, what do you do? And, as a nation, are we ok with the current predominant answer?