North Carolina ends increased pay for teachers holding master degrees

[Yanji]

Personally, I feel that teachers should be amongst the highest paid individuals. (And they wonder why teachers/instructors are so hard to find.)

Currently, the standards for teachers are way too low in most of America to justify higher pay to the extent you're suggesting. In other developed countries, most of which far out-achieve the US in education, such as Finland, Hong Kong and the UK, the government takes a much harder line on education and demand more from people who want to be teachers. I think I mentioned before how you can get certified to teach in Massachusetts in any subject as long as you can pass the MTEL, which itself is an extremely simple test. Most other states have barely higher standards. I understand wanting to allow people to career switch into teaching, but when most other countries generally require the equivalent of at least 30 credits of formal education in the subject you want to teach plus an education degree/certificate, I think most lower-income American education districts will fail to be competitive on an international level. With that being said, I reject the idea that American education is "broken", because there are plenty of good public schools in the US and at the end of the day it's a combination of racial inequality, income disparity and weak government which leads to poorly-performing schools. There's a reason why Prince George's County in MD has terrible schools and Fairfax County in VA, just across the Potomac, has great schools, and teachers themselves are only a very small part of that equation.

Here are the liberals calling for an end to compensating teachers extra for having a useless master's degree. They are okay with a useful master's degree; The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement | Center for American Progress

Interesting how Virginia has arguably the best education system in the country at all levels but they have a relatively low "Master's bump" and low-ish rate of teachers with a Master's degree. I know VA education is partly skewed because of the super-rich counties in NoVA but it seems to support the idea that the Master's degrees most teachers get are largely ineffectual and a waste of public money.