First of all, underpaid teachers are not a problem specific to the US. Even in Finland, which has one of the best education systems in the world, this is a prob

First of all, underpaid teachers are not a problem specific to the US. Even in Finland, which has one of the best education systems in the world, this is a problem [1], just much less so than in the US. The difference in Finland (and other European social democracies) is that with more compressed wages scales, (essentially) free college, and teaching being a high-status job, this is far more manageable. In short, you don't have to pay teachers as much in order to make teaching an attractive profession. Finland requires a graduate degree and (I think) a couple of years of on-the-job training in order to be allowed to teach at schools. In America, applying the same standards would mean that the prospective teacher not only has a significant amount of student debt, but would then also be pretty slow about paying it off. In that situation, why not aim for a better-paying job to begin with? It's not that teacher pay is low relative to the average wage in the US, it's low relative to what a college degree can get you. For similar reasons, France can pay its doctors less than America and still have them be happier with the system. In short, the US needs to spend more to pay people in high-skill professions because of higher inequality; also, other countries spend money on things that are not accounted for under primary and secondary education (such as free tuition), but later help with keeping down costs. I'll note that education spending does not in and of itself fix the problem. There are plenty of affluent countries that perform poorly on the PISA. Attracting qualified teachers is only part of any solution. If you can't attract them through pay (which in principle is possible, not everybody wants to be rich), then the job needs to have perks to make up for it; but the soul-destroying bureaucracy of NCLB is pretty much the opposite. [1] http://worldpress.org/Europe/654.cfm http://worldpress.org/Europe/654.cfm