alt Hacker News> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.
How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.
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Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting? I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly. My impression, from seeing my kids go through public schools, is that the lockstep pay (which can be bumped by getting mostly-useless online degrees) creates bad incentives. There is no way to move up quickly by being an awesome teacher, and mediocre teachers are impossible to get rid of. This hurts morale and drains districts of resources that could be used to pay better-performing teachers.
You don't have to be anti-union to be anti-teachers-union. I know a guy who worked in private schools for a couple decades, and then couldn't get work in public schools because the union would have required a very high pay rate for someone of his seniority. He said they could hire 3 younger people for the same money. I guess freezing out one old guy and hiring three new ones is an increase in recruiting though, right?