That seems pretty high. My mother with 27 years of seniority and a master's degree only makes about that much, and she is the highest-paid teacher in her schoo

That seems pretty high. My mother with 27 years of seniority and a master's degree only makes about that much, and she is the highest-paid teacher in her school district. Starting salary in Maine is something like 30, 32k. Technically, teachers do only work about 3/4 as many days as the rest of us that work full time, but it's not exactly easy to pick up another real job for those two and a half months in the summer. You're not going to get people that have better options to gravitate towards teaching at those kind of rates. Especially for math and sciences, where you could start out making double or triple a teaching salary in an industry job.