Teaching is one of the most important and influential career paths in the world. The responsibility to develop future generations of contributing members of society rests in the hands of educators. In the United States, we continually fail to address the lack of sufficient income for our teachers.

In the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only 34 percent of American teachers reported that they felt teaching was valued by society.

The survey also revealed that job satisfaction for teachers was very high. Eighty-nine percent of American lower secondary school teachers were satisfied with their job, and more than eight out of 10 American lower secondary school teachers would choose to teach again.

Sadly, many American teachers do not have that choice. The market for teachers is forcing them to search for higher paying occupations in other fields. Some do not enter the profession at all.

In the Current Affairs article titled, “There is No Teacher Shortage,” Nathan Robinson reasons that “[t]here are plenty of people qualified to be teachers. They just don’t enter the profession, because states are refusing to compensate them adequately for their services.”

His perspective challenges the widely accepted notion of teacher shortages and highlights many of the underlying systemic problems in American education.

According to an analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute on Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group data, teacher wages fell by $30 per week from 1996 to 2015, while wages for other college graduates increased by $124.

In the United States, teachers’ wages are low across occupations of comparable levels of education. Naturally, teachers get the impression that their profession is not being valued by the American public.

Teachers in historically red states have been losing their patience with low wages and have begun conducting walkouts for higher wages and better school funding.

Recently, many education boards around the nation have been opting for reducing teacher certification requirements to incentivize more people to act as teachers rather than affording higher teacher wages as an incentive.

In a Charleston Gazette-Mail article, staff writer Ryan Quinn reports how the West Virginia House is lowering teaching requirements to address the over 700 teacher vacancies that were not filled by a full-time, fully certified teacher.

Quinn also echoes the statistic revealed by a West Virginia Department of Education presentation that “38 percent of public school math courses in grades seven through 11 are taught by ‘non-fully certified teachers’.” Furthermore, West Virginia was ranked 48th in the nation for teacher salaries in the United States by the National Education Association’s 2016 Rankings of the States.

The situation in West Virginia is a prime example of how low teacher wages devalue the profession of teaching and make it unappealing.

Teaching is an imperative profession to our nation’s future and requires our utmost attention. Too many times in recent years have we undermined the value of our teachers through diminishing wages and undermined the quality of our children’s education through lowering teacher qualifications.

It’s time to offer teachers a respectable income that appropriately matches the importance of their role in shaping America’s future.