Open your eyes and ears before you speak or you risk proving how damn stupid you really are.

So why would anyone want to be a teacher? Mainly because they feel that it would be a service to the community, not because they “bring in the big bucks”.

Oh, and all those seminars and such don’t just pay for themselves. Summer months are usually full of extra training and studying for teachers, time that most other professions would be paid back for.

The Teacher-Pay Myth. If it is teacher quality, instead of class size, that really matters, should we not raise the meager salaries many teachers receive, to recruit better-qualified candidates? Like other education myths, this seemingly plausible argument does not stand up to close scrutiny. Teacher pay, computed on an hourly basis, is not all that meager. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average elementary-school teacher in 2002 made $30.75 per hour. That is considerably more than other public servants, such as firefighters ($17.91) and police officers ($22.64). It is even more than highly skilled professionals, such as biologists ($28.07), mechanical engineers ($29.76), and chemists ($30.68), and just shy of computer scientists ($32.86), dentists ($35.51), and nuclear engineers ($36.16).

Not only do teachers reap benefits like shorter days and longer vacations, but these hourly rates do not include health and retirement benefits, which tend to be higher for public employees than for those in the private sector. Admittedly, these rates do not count hours worked at home, but there is no reason to believe that teachers bring home significantly more work than do other professionals.

This is especially true since most professionals can increase their income by doing more preparation at home, while teachers who take work home cannot expect to earn any more than teachers who never do: Teacher pay is based almost entirely on the number of years taught and the advanced degrees held, not on teachers’ effectiveness. Until we connect salaries to performance, with meaningful merit-pay systems that identify and reward excellent teachers, raising teacher pay is unlikely to have any meaningful effect on teacher quality.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_national_rev-five_myths.htm

Yeah, lets pay them less and count on merit raises (that never seem to happen), good idea, bright boy.