Highlights - We the people - Dave eggers at zeitgeist americas 2011

>>Dave Eggers: It's startling. The economic cost of losing so many teachers and so many of the very best teachers, it's about $5 billion a year is how they estimate the cost of this incredible turnover. And if you look at comparative school systems, like the three school systems in the world that test the best, South Korea, Singapore, and Finland, they treat their teachers entirely differently. One, they pay for their training. Two, they give them incredible support, lots of autonomy. And the pay is, you know, in most cases, 250% or so more than ours. So there, for most college graduates in these countries, it's the most esteemed profession. Everyone's fighting for a chancing to a teacher, because it's considered this, you know, incredibly valuable and crucial and central profession that has incredible prestige. We don't have that here. So their turnover rate is -- the highest among those three countries is 3% a year turnover rate. So if you think about all the institutional knowledge that stays in the classroom, all that stability that stays in the delicate ecology of a school, all of these things, and so we wonder why we can't gain ground in our school system and why we keep falling behind. It starts with paying well, compensating, retaining the best teachers, and keeping them in the classroom. And so -- and, you know, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent almost half a billion dollars on research. And after all of these years of doing studies in all these different ways, Gates came out and said the most important thing is the teacher. Technology is good, all these things, infrastructure. But really we need to find, reward, and keep the best teacher. It seems like a no-brainer, but nationwide, there aren't really any overarching policies to solve this attrition rate. And so, you know, I'm in favor of a stimulus package for teaching. Like, if we can spend billions bailing out banks and things like that, we do need at this point, which is a really crisis -- we're at a crisis right now, especially with budget cuts being what they are, the schools state by state need a stimulus.