I think if starting pay for a highschool teacher was 85k a year, but came with the expectation that your students are utterly prepared for life after highschool

I think if starting pay for a highschool teacher was 85k a year, but came with the expectation that your students are utterly prepared for life after highschool, we could fully resolve issues with k-12. While I agree with the sentiment behind your proposals, I think the real world variance of this throws things of. As an example, I had a very hard time in HS due to social issues, and basically flunked out of math my first year. Went to community college to make up the course; did fine, got a B, and ended up continuing to take CC courses and graduated a year early (did very well in CC compared with HS at the time). Coming from a pretty low income family however, I was still utterly unprepared for higher education, in the sense that 1) my family had 0 experience on navigating the system; or 2) even having expectations of higher education. It never even occurred to me that I was almost 2 years ahead of my piers in accumulated college credits. I ended up going into the military to get the money to go to university, since my family had effectively none. It all worked out in the end, but with some decent mentorship, or even one decent teacher in HS, I could have finished an undergrad degree at 19-20.