I missed that post, but in US it is the local funding of elementary school, that is making US students less equipped for the modern world than all most all other nations we compete with.
I thought that you were in Brazil. American expat?
I don't think that the fact that most people enjoy sports and entertainment more than educational programming on TV has much to do with to poor elementary education. Even graduates of good elementary schools who went on to earn university degrees typically feel the same way.
Poor neighborhoods would need to pay teacher MORE to attract even average quality teachers (They don't want to be abused etc.) but can not even pay as well as average income neighborhoods do.
That assumes that there are objective ways to measure teacher quality that are independent of how well their students do. If that isn't the case, then teachers who want to look good will gravitate to districts where students are likely to outperform.
And if we want to use offers of higher pay to attract better teachers to poor-performing districts, we would have to dislodge the very militant big-city teacher's unions first, so that poor teachers can be terminated and so that hiring and retention is merit-based. If that isn't the case, we just end up paying bad teachers more.
That's assuming that working teachers even see the money. Many of these districts are bloated with well-paid administrators and consultants who never teach. What's more, many of them pay retirees gold-plated benefits from retirement systems that are appallingly underfunded and near bankruptcy. So when more money is directed to schools, sometimes it just ends up going into the teacher retirement system. (If you touch those benefits, there will be big-time labor strife.)
The District of Columbia has higher teacher pay than pretty much any state, but lower student performance than pretty much any state.
Having said all that, I don't think that the real problem is school funding or even the quality of teachers, really. It's the quality of students. This is something that (most emphatically) it's politically incorrect to say, but there's a strong inverse correlation in many parts of the country between percentage of black kids in a school and that school's performance. Everyone tip-toes around it but everyone knows it.
So why is that? I think that it's largely because there's a hugely disfunctional subculture in much of black America. Marriage is unusual and the majority of children are born to single mothers. That's a prescription for poverty right there. Children don't receive the kind of support and attention at home that other kids get. (Compare that to the Chinese immigrant families who might be poor, but push their kids mercilessly to study and do well in school.)
It's especially bad for young black boys. Oftentimes there's no suitable adult male role-models around as they grow up. So boys kind of raise themselves. And oftentimes those they look up to most are the thugs, the criminals and the bad-asses. Being scary and violent is the only kind of status that many of these boys can see themselves achieving. It's how they hope to gain respect.
In that kind of situation, increasing teacher pay in hopes of attracting better math and science instruction is just spitting into the wind. Proposing that the solution is somehow to nationalize schools is foolishness. The underlying social problems in many of the worst performing schools are a lot deeper and intractable than that.
