[schwabacher]

I think this is a bad idea - salaries paid to different fields are a good (although imperfect) way of measuring the value of those skills to society.

If we subsidize education towards less valuable skills at the expense of the most valuable, we end up discouraging people from going into the most needed professions.

[japhyr]

"less valuable skills"

That's a pretty loaded statement. Teacher pay is based on years in the system because it is so difficult to measure individual teacher effectiveness, without incentivizing people to pay more attention to the "good" students and marginalize those who are difficult to teach.

Salaries are largely dependent on how much economic return the position provides to the employer, not on how valuable the skills are to society.

[yummyfajitas]

Teacher pay is based on years in the system because it is so difficult to measure individual teacher effectiveness, without incentivizing people to pay more attention to the "good" students and marginalize those who are difficult to teach.

It's politically difficult, not statistically difficult. Statistically VAM does a great job.

Paying attention to the "good" students vs the difficult to teach ones is not enforced by every objective measurement system, it's purely a function of how you compute the teacher's score. There are many choices:

    # focus on the best, ignore the rest
    student_scores.max() 

    # focus on the worst, ignore the rest
    student_scores.min() 

    # Focus on the cheapest improvements possible
    # independent of whether best or worst
    student_scores.mean()

    # Somewhere in between mean and max
    pow(student_scores,K).mean() 
    # 1 < K < infinity

    #Minimize inequality
    student_scores.variance()

[jpdevereaux]

Very good point, it seems like a perverse reverse incentive. However I don't think that the earnings of a given field speak to its "value" - as I'm sure any teacher would agree.