You do know that a completely free market in education would mean the government getting out of the business of education altogether, including any support for universal education as even just giving vouchers to poor students would violate the principles of a completely free market.
Also, given that teachers are a highly desired resource with strong limits on growth, at least in the short term (i.e. it takes ages to properly train a teacher), I suspect that a completely free market would result in lots of tutors for the very rich and a few schools for the wealthy. Which historically seemed to be the general pattern in countries where education was not socialised to some degree.
I don't want a banana republic either. What my beef is with are teachers that make 60K plus, get 3 months off, have more stable job security than the private sector, get to spend time talking about interesting things like world wars in history class or Hemingway in english and then complain that they don't make as much as me, a software developer who spends chunks of my day on mundane tasks such as fixing 'Out of Memory' errors or 'Null Pointer' exceptions'. I do it for the money. They do it for different reasons. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges.
What you want is unreasonable, and is counter to the actual research. Quoting from Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, Lawrence Mishel (2008) The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.
"...we found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience (p. 13), a gap only minimally offset by higher non-wage benefits in teaching. Though teacher earnings have fallen below that of the average college graduate in recent decades, we showed that teachers lost considerable ground during the late 1990s, as earnings of college graduates grew 11% relative to 0.8% growth in teaching."
Okay, so you don't want any teacher making 60K plus. Of course, a teacher is often required to have a bachelor's degree and many have graduate degrees. (I see that 60+% of Chicago teachers have at least a master's degree.)
The market says (from a 2011 CNN report) "Students who will graduate this spring are receiving job offers with starting salaries averaging $50,034 per year, up 3.5% from last year, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers." On the low end of the listed salaries, "Offers for business administration/management graduates slipped slightly to $44,171."
So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable.
Ahh, but you say that teachers "spend time talking about interesting things", while you don't, and those joys in life should be sufficient compensation for not pulling in the big bucks. The average salary for 'Programmer V', with 8-10 years of experience is $104K. Do you think that being able to talk about Hemingway is worth $40K/year in lost wages? Don't you think that grading papers, and preparing curriculum around standardized tests, and dealing with misbehaving students is the actual comparable to 'Out of Memory' errors?
And as for complaining about unstable job security in your field - if you're that jealous of what the teachers have managed, why don't you unionize and advocate for more job security in your own field?
Also, you only do programming for the money? Strange. I started programming because it was fun, and only later did I find out that people would pay me a lot of money to do things I found fun. Like tracking down bizarre segmentation errors. I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.
>>So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable.
What? To say that I want them to make no more than 60K shows you're not even reading what I wrote.
>> I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.
What again? You clearly don't get that what I'm saying, which is that people in ivory towers should not be making decisions on what people make, the market should.
You wrote "What my beef is with are teachers that make 60K plus, get 3 months off, have more stable job security than the private sector, get to spend time talking about interesting things like world wars in history class or Hemingway in english and then complain that they don't make as much as me, a software developer who spends chunks of my day on mundane tasks such as fixing 'Out of Memory' errors or 'Null Pointer' exceptions'."
I am replying specifically to those points. Okay, you're complaint is that they are complaining that they don't make enough as you do. Well, cry me a river. They can complain all that they want. Part of the free market says that they can use whatever strategy they find most effective. If one of their 10 complaints is to point out that by paying under market rate means that the best and the brightest are more likely drawn into dumb-ass programming jobs where people moan about memory leaks all day, rather than help teach the next generation of citizens what it means to be a citizen, then I say fine, they should go for it.
Yes, you get to complain all you want about their complaints. But as you have no evidence to back up your claims that listening to teenagers talk about Hemingway is part of the job satisfaction worth a $40K difference in pay, then I don't see see the problem, and you aren't worth listening to.
Also, given that teachers are a highly desired resource with strong limits on growth, at least in the short term (i.e. it takes ages to properly train a teacher), I suspect that a completely free market would result in lots of tutors for the very rich and a few schools for the wealthy. Which historically seemed to be the general pattern in countries where education was not socialised to some degree.