I feel that we do need to reward the "good" teachers a lot better than what is currently common practice. Having two close relatives that are teachers I hear firsthand the struggles they deal with just to be teachers. Sometimes it is hard to imagine why anyone would ever want to go into that field, but knowing these people the way I do I know that it is their true desire to be there and to do everything within their ability to be good teachers to our children. So why wouldn't we want to reward them for taking on such a huge and important responsibility of educating our children.