Improving teacher quality in America’s schools will take much time and hard work. You would have to start from the ground up, training new teachers from scratch based on partially lost knowledge. You would have to raise college admission standards and require four years of academic work in the teacher’s core subject.
Education degrees and teacher licensing, by the way, should be done away with. They are expensive and ineffective.
I don’t think the problem can be summed up so easily. I believe it’s a symptom of a systemic issue: part of which has been the erosion of the idea of the common good. It should be understood, as it was in the distant past, that investing in youth benefits all of us. I don’t mean we ought to throw more money at public schools. That has been tried but doesn’t help. If however the upbringing and education of our youth was more of a concern for society at large, we likely wouldn’t be having this conversation.
I can get behind this.
One of my greatest criticisms of economics as a discipline is its axiomatic belief that the pursuit of self-interest necessarily makes everyone better off. The common good doesn’t need to be looked out for because it will naturally follow if people just do their thing.
But rich people putting their kids on private schools doesn’t help society. Abandoning public schools to property taxes and the value of a home, also doesn’t help society, and especially doesn’t help kids.
Did you know that, unlike every other school district in America, there is one that gets $8 million of federal money per year simply for being where it is? One school district. Coincidentally, it’s located in an area that has some of the most educated people in the world and doesn’t need anywhere near that level of support. (There are your hints…)