> Doesn’t paying more money or reducing class size (by hiring more teachers) directly imply the existing crop of teachers can’t handle the job?

Yes. Then the question becomes, is the job reasonable? I think the article author, as well as the person you replied to, would say No. Not to mention tens of thousands of recently former teachers across the US.

> Or are you saying we pay the exact same people more money?

I won’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m saying that, as is the article author.

> And reduce class sizes how?

See “pay the exact same people more money”.

Even when they can handle it as best as you can expect from someone, it's still not going to be enough.

You can reduce class sizes by hiring more teachers. Their salaries aren't actually a huge fraction of education spending (only around ~15% if you assume one teacher for every 30 fulltime students and 80k TC per fulltime teacher, both of which are deliberate overestimates).

Hire 30% more teachers, give them a 30% pay bump, and reduce unneeded spending such as excessive sports spending beyond what is useful to the students. Remove unnecessary administrative load from the teachers. Reduce school hours that are very often lengthened for babysitting reasons.

You can even cut the last year of education and tack it into community college while making it optional.

I like a lot of what you say, but

> Reduce school hours that are very often lengthened for babysitting reasons.

This babysitting is vital for many families, most of whom are low income and can’t afford alternatives. If we reduce class hours we should provide something to keep children positively occupied.

I agree, we should, but we don't necessarily need teachers to do that. At my school we had an after hours service where the monitors would have kids play outside, play/learn boardgames, watch educationalish movies, learn to cook, etc.., for an extra 3-5$ a day for up to 4 hours. The class sizes were much larger of course and there is no correction or study plan involved. I think that's a good and economical solution to this very real problem. Of course it should be free for lower income households if not for everyone.

Personally my parents just made me walk around, though ;)

We had this as well... OSHC (Out of School Hours Care). It was mostly staffed by volunteer parents with one or two school employees (since it was on school grounds and presumably needed trusted persons to lock up / have a first aid and/or fire warden available / etc.

That said, I'm curious as to what age this care would be required? Back In My Day ™ I was entrusted with a house key at a relatively young age (10? 11? it was a while ago...) and would walk myself home / prepare food / generally take care of myself until an adult came home. But these days you hear about police being called for kids playing without an adult present in a fenced-in front yard (and the fact that as I understand the USA is far less walkable than where I live) which makes me wonder what age is considered suitable over there?

I was handling all my own meals except dinner and had a house key at around the same age in the US. I'm not sure how drastically things have changed in the ensuing 20 years, but I still see kids walking and playing without adults, so I suspect it's both exaggerated and regional or class-based.

Sports have a huge amount of value for young people, your perspective on this is not dearly as reasonable as you make it seem.

They absolutely do. I benefitted a lot from sports as a kid. You just don't need to put as much money into them as many schools do. For example many schools nowadays have their own pool, or multiple stadiums, dozens of teams with multiple long distance travel a year, and so on, while a lot of that could be using shared infrastructure or done outside of the school.

And often the vast majority of the money in sports is concentrated towards a very small fraction of the student population, often for regional pride above their self-actualisation. A lot of high school athletes are quite miserable or do it out of social pressure.

I'm not saying we need less sports, we can just do it with less money that is better allocated.