alt Hacker News> The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum.
Taking this at face value: how are you teasing apart "lack of real teachers" from the budget? You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
> The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I received.
How are you doing this comparison? Have you adjusted for cost of living and the alternative opportunities available to good teachers and such? I ask because usually people compare absolute amounts of money, which distorts the picture.
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> You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
Budget goes beyond teacher salary. It's also for giving teachers the tools they need, giving students the support they need, and schools the building maintenance that it needs. Good teachers can't teach and good children can't learn if they don't have the material, nor can they function well if their primary needs aren't met (well-fed, healthy, comfortable).
>You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
No, this has been proven many times that money is not a leading factor: Just one : https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED418160
The only clear indication of student performance is parent participation and involvement.
You say that in USA there are no good teachers because any that are good will find better-paying professions?
This sounds plausible. Like the previous poster, I have grown in an Eastern European country where everybody was extremely poor by today's standards. Education was not perfect and there were many mediocre teachers and even bad teachers.
However, there were also a great number of very good teachers, so there were good chances that you would happen to have at least a few good teachers. There were also many opportunities for the best students to learn beyond the normal curriculum, either by self-study in good free libraries or by attending special extra-curricular classes held by the best teachers for various sciences.
I have a lot of friends who have migrated to USA many decades ago. All of them complain about how bad is the education that their children are receiving, in comparison with what we had when we were young, which matches what the previous poster was saying.
While in the schools that I attended as a young child the teachers would have been considered very poor in comparison with any US teacher of today, in comparison with most other professions available at that time they had decent salaries, so indeed there were not many non-illegal alternatives that would have been a better career choice.