[Waterluvian]

Here's the crappy thing. We should pay you more to teach middle school math if you're a remarkably better teacher than the rest.

In high school some of my favourite teachers were there mostly as a semi-retirement job. My favourite was a retired Intel architect who taught grade 10 electrical engineering.

I would have been spoiled rotten if we were able to consistently attract those kinds of teachers.

[chickenfries]

It's pretty well agreed on HN that you get what you pay for, and anyone who complains about being unable to hire good developers simply just isn't compensating well enough.

Why on earth would you not want to pay a better qualified teacher more? You must think that teaching is easy because the math is not complicated, yet most of the people who say this would loathe the idea of teaching for a living.

[mbrumlow]

The problem is having a PhD does not make your more qualified -- or even a good teacher.

Teaching something to somebody requires very specalized skills. And frankly most teachers in k-12 seem to lack this -- at least when. I went to school.

[Spooky23]

Compensation once adequate doesn’t yield directly in performance for higher level tasks.

Teachers apply knowledge, experience and work in a way that magically makes you smarter and informed. Their effectiveness is a measure of their skill and the students. The argument against the unions is bunk — paying a premium for a math PhD to teach high school is probably pretty dumb... experience makes you effective at teaching trigonometry, not PhD expertise in math.

Go to any catholic school and you’ll see woefully unpaid teachers doing an amazing job — because the parents and therefore the students are very motivated.

The discussions about developers are similar. You need to overpay for people in a few metros... but you can pay a lot less for skilled people all over the place. The wacky salaries in industry have more to do with control and investors than the actual work.

[Retric]

Pay is not just about increasing performance it also increases retention. Retaining your best performers is harder than the people doing the minimum. Once you get to the point where the people with 10+ years are the unmotivated people not putting in the effort to find a better job you slowly enter a death spiral.

[tonyarkles]

> Why on earth would you not want to pay a better qualified teacher more?

Maybe I'm misreading what the parent said (and got downvoted like crazy for). My interpretation of it was an indictment of the teachers unions, where someone who comes in with a background like his teacher had (serious industry experience) is going to get bottom of the barrel pay because of the lack of seniority etc.

I absolutely think someone with that kind of experience should be able to make good money as a teacher, even if they're teaching grade 10 physics. There's also some amazing teachers who came into the career through the traditional path that should be making way more than they are.