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As a former teacher, I can assure you that there are thousands of outstanding teachers who work for pathetically low wages as a labor of love. My first teaching job, many years ago, was at a small rural school that had such a poor tax base that they couldn't afford to meet the state minimum teacher pay level, so the state had to make up the difference, and the pay was embarrassing for a master's level college prepared educator.
The net result is that we are expecting teachers and other public servants to provide world-class performance at barely above poverty wages and then wonder why we aren't attracting the best and brightest college grads into the teaching profession. You get what you pay for in many cases, and it's a tribute to those who work long hours preparing lesson plans "off the clock" who keep on "keeping on" when the public blames them for lack of parental support, increasingly overcrowded classrooms, and an impossible range of both functional and dysfunctional students with MTV attention spans in the same classroom.
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