I always found the question, "How much should we pay teachers?" to be an extremely difficult one.
Because if you're looking for the profession that has the greatest net-good on society, it's hard to argue for anything other than teachers. They're fundamental to the perpetual success of this country. By that metric, we should pay them a fortune.
But if we pay them a fortune, then people who aren't actually passionate about the job and are just seeking a high paycheck get hired into education, and the system gets overrun with crap teachers. So we should make the pay minimal to avoid this.
But if we make the pay minimal, there will certainly be plenty of would-be amazing teachers who never enter into the profession because they don't think they can make a comfortable living in it.
So what's the answer here? Pay teachers a high enough salary to push budding teachers into the career but low enough that paycheck hunters don't join them? But this logic would imply we're putting a ceiling on teacher salaries because their job is too important and we can't afford to screw it up. Does that sound fair at all? Not really.
I guess I'll just leave this one to the unions.
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