Canada has demographics comparable to the US's, but pays its teachers much more. The results are evident in OECD's "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA) http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/60/46619703.pdf
A rewarding job with decent compensation and time off makes teaching jobs pretty competitive.
There are very bad majority black public school districts in the country which are shockingly well-funded. DC public schools comes to mind, which regularly ranks in the top three in spending per child but has atrocious performance. The last school Chancelor who tried to fire bad teachers got ran out of town.
Repeat after me: money is not the problem. The facts are simply against people who think America doesn't spend enough money on education. Rather, America doesn't spend its money effectively enough.
It's not just black people, although that's the majority where I live (Oakland, California). In most states that border mexico or western states with large agricultural economies, it tends to be hispanics. Among those hispanics are a lot of first generation kids ("anchor kids" in many cases) whose parents don't speak english at home.
Never mind that the US doesn't have an official language; a lot of people are offended if their tax dollars go to people who don't "learn our language!"
I don't see how it is unreasonable to expect immigrants to adapt themselves to the country they voluntarily choose to enter.
I'm contemplating a move to Pune - if I go, I certainly wouldn't expect the Indian taxpayer to pay for me to learn Hindi. Adopting yourself to the local culture/conventions/language/etc is your job - if you can't handle it, stay home.
I wouldn't expect them to pay for you to learn Hindi either. However, Marathi might get you further in Pune, especially with the locals, as it's the official language of the region.
Unfortunately, if you take this rather pessimistic position, things do line up rather nicely. It even explains why some groups seem to vote against their own best interest.
Yet it's the big discussion that is generally off the table. Rather things are framed as big vs small gov't, yet there are a lot of inconsistencies in that argument. These inconsistencies disappear when you frame it as racists vs bleeding heart liberals.
Do you have any statistics that compare the teacher pay of the US and Canada? The US spends more on education per pupil than almost every country in the world (some years I believe it is number one). I would be shocked if the US didn't pay more than Canada, on average.
According to this Cato report. Since the 1970s the US doubled spending per child. Scores did not improve but they doubled the number of school bureaucrats (e.g. not teachers) per student.
It might not be so helpful to compare salaries alone (although I've heard they're actually higher in Canada, but don't have hard statistics). Remember , Canadians do have to pay for health insurance, so even if they have smaller salaries, they could still end up with more disposable income.
A rewarding job with decent compensation and time off makes teaching jobs pretty competitive.