and comments like yours that indicates you feel they are not, just hurts, that's all. You are free to disagree, but I'm just telling you it hurts teachers to be told they aren't worth more than 35K a year and that they don't work as hard as others. They end up feeling, "why am I even doing this?" and as you say, they CAN choose other professions, so they do ... and that's why 5 year attrition is approaching 60%, which is not a good thing for our kids. If we care about our kids, at least for them, we should try to get the best teachers to not leave the profession. How? Pay and respect, that's all. Same as you and me ... we want to be paid and we want to be respected. We can probably tolerate not having one or the other, but not both.