I majored in math, and had several future math teachers in my homework group.  One answer is future high school math teachers are some of the worst math students.  I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s totally unrelated to the pay being completely shit.<p>I have a friend who teaches in a Belmont (peninsula in the valley) school.  He also works as a receptionist at a gym 4 days a week after working at the school, and he still spends half his take home pay on rent.  So he&#x27;s at the school where he teaches by 6:55AM and leaves the gym at 10PM, then does grading.  The only reason you would legitimately struggle to understand why it&#x27;s hard to hire teachers or why skilled people don&#x27;t do it is because you&#x27;re a startup founder (why aren&#x27;t engineers jumping take a $50k paycut in exchange for most-likely-worthless 0.1% options?  Engineering shortage!)<p>In the bay area in CA, teaching is a cute hobby that has to be supported by a spouse or a second job.  If you want to draw more high-quality people into the profession, change that.  And then maintain the changes and wait 10+ years at least for the knowledge to percolate and another generation of teachers to come up through high school and college.