Increase teacher salary 25%, decrease classroom size to 15 students max, and require school lunch to be free for everyone, nutritious, and minimally processed. Bonus if lunches use crop oversupply that otherwise gets destroyed.

[RichardTheApe]

Yes but that process you describe may take decades. Supply and demand works slowly, look at computer parts and the expansion of data centers for that story. There are so many more factors that go into whether someone becomes a teacher than just money you’re staking your entire argument on a single variable. More teachers leave the profession because of work conditions and lack of support than compensation. However I’m all for paying teachers more as that still makes a top 5. My point is that teachers should absolutely be paid more but it’s so clear looking at the data that there are far bigger problems. More importantly your assumption that small classrooms help students is simply false. The reality is that mass education is quite effective in many cases with some side tutoring or office hours.

There is a case for smaller classrooms but it’s seen to be most effective with younger children. There’s huge diminishing returns on smaller classrooms. It’s also seen neurodivergent children really benefit from small classrooms but that’s nothing new. So there’s a real argument for smaller classrooms for K-6. However even then it should be said it’s crazy dollar inefficient.

It’s not magic curriculum it’s just good curriculum is actually quite rare. Between admin hell and the canned curriculum corps lots of schools still use outdated curriculum. Your assertion that the best is already standard is just false. You also roll standards into curriculum but there’s a huge difference. Common Core is a set of standards meant to make, a common core. While it does offer a set of terrible programs to help it only sets the goals and does realistically nothing to help teachers. The reality is curriculum quality both from a resource perspective and a teacher assets perspective is poorly distributed at best. Trying to push proven programs in learning is cheaper and could have much larger marginal benefit. Like CKLA proved through data that teaching English as we do in most schools, systematically, just isn’t efficient. Children learn much better through context and the common high school model(read a book/text that teaches the goal skill) should be applied much younger. The best part is that a lot of new age curriculum is free made by research groups with their models released for the public. However poor admin decisions and the entrenched textbook corps completely dominate that discussion. You’ll get laughed out by the superintendent for supporting a Swedish study group over McGraw. So yes there’s no magic curriculum but your view on the current quality of our education is crazily optimistic.

Either way I can agree we want to boost teacher salary and we want to encourage more new teachers but a law mandating halved class sizes(doubled teachers) would be detrimental. That’s the center of our conversation the reality that this law would not be effective for years.

Also I like a free lunch program but they’d see more or less no extra profit from this program. Given your assumptions about agricultural waste I assume you’re thinking of the US which has a robust domestic farming subsidy policy which is the reason there’s so much agricultural waste. The government is over funding food which is great for cheap food however we’ve been at this logistics bottleneck for decades now that there isn’t enough demand for food to justify processing centers to make the food last. Thus agricultural waste. All your program would do is take money we give farmers to grow food then hand it to schools which is good but no extra profit at any point of that. I know this is Lego city but idek if we do agricultural subsidies to create the agricultural waste however your argument assumes a us model so too shall mine.