I always get frustrated with debates about education budgets because anti-public-school folks focus on the salaries made by teachers at the top of the pay scale and administrators while ignoring the crappy starting salaries or the fact that enough teachers spend out of their own pocket for school supplies that the IRS offers a special deduction for them. As Drum points out in the linked post, paying starting salaries that meet the proportional average for developed countries would require a pretty hefty price tag.

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