(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Choice Remarks carries my article on OU President David Boren’s proposal to solve our education problems by throwing money at them – and doing so totally indiscriminately. Here’s one part of the proposal:
Another $125 million would go to higher education to keep down tuition and fees.
Yeah . . . I’ll just leave that there.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
On his proposal for an unconditional pay increase of $5,000 for all teachers… We have very good experimental evidence that this does not improve outcomes: http://rady.ucsd.edu/docs/Double%20for%20Nothing%20-%2012%20June%202014%20.pdf
#1 .. Do not generalize your salary statements across all k-12 publicly funded education. Take a look at current vacancies for Math teachers in AZ. Lots of openings all the time and very low salaries for college math majors– so why teach when there are loans to pay?
#2 .. Merit pay would work a lot better if it was school wide and rewarded academic whole school improvement. Teaching works better as a Team Sport.
#3 .. Talk about low pay for teachers and resulting vacancies… Try schools funded by the Bureau of Indian Education … where about 10% of teaching positions are vacant for an entire school year.
Just because the Oklahoma Governor has no idea how to improve schools… ==>> Don’t think that salaries are adequate when they fail to attract enough skilled teachers in various subject areas and localities.
As I said in my article, salaries are largely driven by the requirements to enter the profession. Thus it makes perfect sense that even though the teaching profession as a whole is not “underpaid” relative to comparable professions (contrary to your suggestion), nonetheless the subset of teachers working in subjects associated with fields that have higher requirements for entry – basically STEM – are underpaid compared to those fields.
Blame for this rests 100% with the teacher unions, who are the only people who prefer to have all teachers paid the same regardless of field, which makes no sense for anyone other than them.