No matter how important teaching is, teaching 20 kids per year is worth about $30K.
If the goal of education is to produce 18 year olds with social adjustment, like and work skills, and the ability to work or get into college, let's be explicit about that! If there's a clear goal, a market, and competition, costs always go down.
Web browsers are free because both companies and non-profits can build them, benefit from providing them, and can't charge more than free. Computing used to be done by hand by humans, now you can buy millions of person-equivalents of computing for less than the cost of coffee. Why is it so cheap? Because companies wanted the dollars people would give in exchange for fast computation. Horses aren't used as transportation because someone invented cars, people fly across the ocean instead of taking ocean liners, etc because companies wanted the money people would spend on fast travel. Pens exist because companies wanted the dollars people would spend on fast, clean writing. Look at anything around you and it's there because someone outperformed other people in the competition for the dollars you spent on it. Every time, you either got the same product for less money (think Dell laptops), a better product for the same money (think of how Apple provides the best product they can at basically fixed price points), or often a better product for less money.
Schools districts spend between $5-15K/student/yr. We're doing it the same way we have for 100 years. Lack of competition or even an opt-out policy has given us a worse product for a higher cost (http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-scho...). It is very, very, very reasonable to expect that open competition with well-defined expectations would be both cheaper and better.
The market is not the solution to every problem. Many problems sure, maybe even most but not all.
It really seems like there are a lot of people talking about what the market will do who haven't done even cursory studies of what market theory actually is. Do you know what market elasticity is? Without it the market can't work. That's why, for example, the market can't save us with health care. Health care is fundamentally inelastic (you'd pay any price for a life saving operation because without it you, to quote a movie, lose everything you've ever had and ever will have).
I believe we have a similar situation with education. You can't just opt out if it costs too much.
EDIT:
>No matter how important teaching is, teaching 20 kids per year is worth about $30K.
How do you know this? We know that we pay $30K/year now. We know that our teaching quality is awful. Doesn't that actually demonstrate (or at the very least strongly suggest) that it is in fact worth more?
I know about the market and elasticity very well, thank you. Saying that the market doesn't solve every problem in no way implies that it can't solve a given problem. But one key ingredient is that you have to know what you're purchasing, which is one reason why health care is so messed up.
By opt-out I mean opt-out of your standard assigned school district, not out of education. You should be able to take your $X per-child that would go to the district and spend it on any educational program that meets defined standards.
Teaching 20 kids per year is worth $30K by definition, because that's what we pay people to do it. There is a high, positive return on additional money invested in better education, but we as a society are not opting for it.
> Saying that the market doesn't solve every problem in no way implies that it can't solve a given problem.
Nope, I never made such an illogical assertion.
>By opt-out I mean opt-out of your standard assigned school district, not out of education.
I was pointing out why education may be inelastic. Not assuming you didn't want your children educated.
>Teaching 20 kids per year is worth $30K by definition
Extremely bizarre logic. If we pay $30k for something and fail then it obviously something is wrong. If other systems pay more than this and don't fail (or at least not as badly) then that makes a rather strong case that the pay is too low.
>but we as a society are not opting for it.
That doesn't mean it's worth less, that means you're not paying enough and it shows. This furthers the argument that education may not be an elastic market. If people are simply incapable of acting in their own best interest (given the choice, always picking the crappy cheap education for their kids) then there must be intervention.
The only reason I'm not convinced that this is indeed the case are grandalf's posts.
If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation.
Professions that are a natural part of human life and thus simultaneously enjoyable and in demand as a career for a lot of the population will always have lower salaries. Like all careers, there is a competitive marketplace and many components to compensation.
And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them. And if they are not, perhaps we should not be entrusting out children to them.
Of course, none of this applies to a unionized situation. The pay is dependent on how much political pressure can be applied not on mutual benefit.
>If people accept less money for teaching than they could earn elsewhere, it is because they enjoy teaching and that enjoyment is part of the compensation.
I wish people would stop trotting this nonsense out all the time. It's not specifically a myth or a fallacy but rather an occurrence so rare as to be useless. Worse, it's usually presented by people trying to justify paying too little for a given job. There are simply not enough people willing to forgo a nice comfortable middle class lifestyle just to be able to pursue their passion of teaching children. And why would they? Most people probably have more than just one passion, so why choose the one that pays the worst (not to mention dealing with passion-killing bureaucracy day by day)? As a result, the US public school system actually gets made up of a mix of genuinely passionate teachers and people who see it as a safe government profession where they have to read silly books to stupid kids all day. In my experience, the mix heavily favors the latter.
>And people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what's right for them.
They have. That's why the people best at teaching are usually somewhere they can be compensated for it. Are you seriously suggesting the people we should be entrusting our children to are the lowest bidders? If these people are passionate and don't care about keeping up with the Jones' then there are probably other places they could donate their time that don't have such miserable politics to deal with.
If the goal of education is to produce 18 year olds with social adjustment, like and work skills, and the ability to work or get into college, let's be explicit about that! If there's a clear goal, a market, and competition, costs always go down.
Web browsers are free because both companies and non-profits can build them, benefit from providing them, and can't charge more than free. Computing used to be done by hand by humans, now you can buy millions of person-equivalents of computing for less than the cost of coffee. Why is it so cheap? Because companies wanted the dollars people would give in exchange for fast computation. Horses aren't used as transportation because someone invented cars, people fly across the ocean instead of taking ocean liners, etc because companies wanted the money people would spend on fast travel. Pens exist because companies wanted the dollars people would spend on fast, clean writing. Look at anything around you and it's there because someone outperformed other people in the competition for the dollars you spent on it. Every time, you either got the same product for less money (think Dell laptops), a better product for the same money (think of how Apple provides the best product they can at basically fixed price points), or often a better product for less money.
Schools districts spend between $5-15K/student/yr. We're doing it the same way we have for 100 years. Lack of competition or even an opt-out policy has given us a worse product for a higher cost (http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/16/money-is-not-what-scho...). It is very, very, very reasonable to expect that open competition with well-defined expectations would be both cheaper and better.