We Shouldn't Reward Teachers ...

[Recursion]

131. Yes and no

Teachers' median salaries nationally are higher than the rest of the countries' median salaries nationally, but teachers are also much more highly educated than the rest of the population so it's not a very good comparison. Compare them to middle managers, say (another population in which pretty much everybody has a bachelor's degree and most have a masters) and it shakes out they make rather less than their cohort.

The "up" side of this, at least until recently, was that in a lot of cases they had a level of job security and benefits that's pretty much unheard of in what remains of the rest of the economy. It was a trade-off (and kind of reflects the public-sector private-sector tradeoff in general).

As for highly respected? depends, I guess. What they did and do have is district bureaucracies that try to micromanage every professional decision they make, and -- especially recently -- parents who simply refuse to believe that their precious little Trevor or Caitlyn could possibly be at fault in any situation, and are more than happy to go to the administration at the first sign of pushback from the teacher. For all the cool things about charters, my main reason for disliking them is that they seem to entrench that "consumer" mindset among parents.