Teacher salaries are public in my state (every state?) so I just looked up my local school. For the record, this is a rural location in Minnesota - each grade has a little over 100 students. My wife’s sister is 33 years old and has worked there for a few years. Her yearly salary is $47,000, and has been rapidly increasing each year - nearly 10% a year. It looks like teachers that I would guess are in their 40s and 50s are capped out at about $74,000 a year.

That’s roughly what my 32 year old accountant wife gets, and they get nearly 3 months vacation a year and much better benefits and retirement stuff than she does. Considering I know more people that have gone in to the teaching profession than anything else, that seems more than fair.

Also, a lot of those older teachers that I looked up would have been fired from any other job if their performance was the same. I’d only be ok with a massive increase in teacher pay if teacher’s unions were abolished. The only firings that have happened to tenured teachers here in the past 20 years have been for sexual misconduct.