> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability.
2) You've made a few statements of objective fact here without backing them up. Does the US actually invest little in education? I suspect that a lot of the money is of course wasted, but they do spend a crapload of money, and I'd bet dramatically more than many other countries. As another thing, does increasing spending (as the only variable that changes) lead to dramatic differences in educational outcomes? To a point, I'm sure it helps, but at some point, I think it doesn't. As an example, a young Forest Gump might be able to pass Basic Arithmetic in his elementary school if given a private tutor who gave him their full attention and effort, but there's no universe in which Forrest Gump gets an A+ in Advanced Calculus even if he's given 1,000 of the best teachers in the world to personally tutor him 24/7.
3) There's an age old debate about Nature vs. Nurture, which of course will not be settled here today. But I'd like to point out that if "Nature" is generally the most important variable in success, then beyond a certain point, there's a level of diminishing returns with education spending and simply throwing money at schools is not a wise course. Just throwing more money at a problem is, I suspect, the path we've taken up until now.