This is another indication of how far out of whack our priorities are as a country. You make money based on how much money you make for someone else, or how hard your position is to fill. But we won't spend money just because something is important; like teachers or quality infrastructure or mitigating climate change or whatever.
The linked article talks about how hard it is to get good teachers for computing because anyone who's any good at it can make a lot more money elsewhere. Is anyone proposing paying a computing teacher $90,000 a year, or whatever is competitive, to compensate for that?
I had an excellent electronics teacher in HS who mentioned once that he took a 50% paycut when he switched from industry to teaching so I agree
with you completely but what system would you propose? Should we rank occupations and pay them what we value them? This might be possible
in a controlled economy but I'm not sure how you would do it in a free market. Do people who are more skilled at that occupation get paid more?
Even unions have a hard time with this, do you pay based on skill level or senority or something else?
Everyone seems to want to pay teachers less because they get summers off. Nobody wants to pay them more because for the vital function they serve in our society. Like I said, priorities out of whack.
Besides the other benefits of year round school, this might be an added benefit to help eliminate this excuse but it's not the complete fix for it as
police officers, etc.. are also underpaid and don't have that excuse.
Daycares have a similiar problem. In order to make day care affordable, they cannot afford to pay the staff hardly anything because it soon becomes
cost prohibitive. Where I live, daycare workers make about $8 per hour but it still costs $4 per hour to put your kid in daycare so if you have only 2 kids
you need to make over $8 per hour to even pay for the cost of the daycare.
The only semi-reasonable solution I can think of to the education problem would be conscription or some sort of co-op system where everyone reaching
the age of 40(or even 65) is required to teach a number of years. This would get the experienced people you want and you could even make it a condition
to receive social security like mandatory registration is for college aid. The biggest problem I see with this (besides the fact that conscription isn't ideal) is
that you are getting experienced teachers who are experienced in their field but not necessarily experienced at teaching.
Even this solution though only solves a fraction of the problem and doesn't do anything about the football player making millions while the other presumably
more important occupations like research or people making the world a better place make a fraction of that amount.