"The Fiscal Cliff" Really???

[Jester]

Since there is no quality control on the education the kids get, then there is no difference between paying mediocre, or high wages since the outcome on average is mediocre. The government is taking health care in that direction, but sometimes people get to choose their doctors now which creates demand (and higher wages) for the good ones. Simply paying them more does not make them perform better. If you raise the bar for entry in a profession, you will raise the costs (due to shortage) and possibly the quality, but you will have shortage resulting in more students per teacher and thereby lower quality. This may make teaching more attractive, but I'm not sure it would resolve the issues.

Unless we move it to the private sector (or ape it better), there will not be anything other than a "civil servent" feeling to the teaching profession.

For whatever reason, the thrust of the argument doesn't seem to be getting across here. Imagine a smart, capable person who is trying to decide what kind of career to pursue. They look at all the options, weigh the pros and cons, and decide. So long as teaching pays crap wages, gets little to no respect from anyone, and the degrees are printed on toilet paper, then this talented person is almost certainly going to go become a lawyer, or a banker, or a doctor, or whatever else. The people who go into teaching will either be those talented few with a slightly unhinged love of teaching, or people who can't hack it in harder disciplines.

Guilds control their own quality. We do not lack for quality lawyers and doctors, and they are among the least private, most highly regulated professions. If we made education more like those professions, by both demanding more from our teachers and paying them better, we would get better teachers.

And for what it's worth, teacher/student ratios don't seem to matter very much, when they do the cross-country regressions. Teacher quality is vastly more important than teacher quantity.

-Jester