re: Oklahoma teachers planning statewide strike

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That's the underlying problem with public education. It's one of the easiest degrees to get at any university and because of that there are too many "qualified" teachers which keeps wages low.

Teaching should be a high wage career and becoming a teacher should me MUCH harder.

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Biggest problem is you have to pay all teachers the same rate and wage increases are based solely on years worked instead of job performance, because "fairness." Teachers Unions created this nightmare, and now they want to play the victim (shocker).

Areas where there is higher demand for teachers but low supply of willing applicants, like science, math, special education fields, should be able to start those positions at a higher rate. People who put in the time to go into those fields have options outside of school systems, and even the highest starting teacher salaries in the country don't always compete with those options.

Instead, those positions are paid the same as the very low demand teaching positions with high supply, like gym, English, History, foreign language of any kind, music, or art. Unless they're extremely lucky, most people have very few options other than teaching when it comes to those fields. They were stupid to go into them in the first place, and clearly didn't look at the job outlook before deciding on those majors. Those high-supply teaching positions should be getting paid less simply based on supply and demand, but that can't happen. 30k sounds extremely fair to me for a position that has such a high surplus of available teachers.

TLDR: We should be putting an effort into encouraging people to seek out math, science, and other in-demand teaching positions by paying those positions more competitive wages to draw them into teaching, and we should not tie all teaching salaries to what we should pay those positions of need.