I Should Have Been a Teacher; well, if I started in Georgia!!

I just finished up doing my simple Open Georgia Analysis which was focused on various Hadoop ecosystem tools for performing data analysis, but I know... that's why that posting was on my "professional" blog.  Again, I know, probably not what the average reader of this blog cares about (do I actually have readers?), but I did want to share an interesting data point that I ran across while reviewing the publicly-available data from Open Georgia (the site that the State of Georgia stood up to explain to its citizens where their tax payer dollars are going).

Simply put... there are MANY teachers in Georgia making SIX-FIGURES.  Wow! 

Please understand that my wife, Gretchen, (and other family & friends) are public school educators so I for one wholeheartedly agree that teachers (and cops, firefighters, military service members, etc) simply are underpaid, BUT... these kind of salaries simply don't make sense to me and surely don't make financial sense if we were imagining paying all teachers that well.

This isn't to say that all Georgia teachers can make that kind of money.  In fact, Gretchen makes less than half of that and looking at her pay scale will NEVER make that kind of money as a public school teacher in Georgia.  Why then do we have so many teachers making these highly-skewed salaries?  I'm not 100% sure.  Gretchen has explained some old loopholes that folks took advantage of when they existed.  I think most have been shut down, but the state seems very reluctant to adjust salaries to align them with current policies and pay practices.

I know it would never be popular, but I'd re-adjust salaries.  Yes, I'm saying I'd take that money back.  I'd be as fair as I can about it as nobody ever wants to make less money than they do now, but this just doesn't make sense to me.  I'd be nice about it and reduce their salaries over a five year period by eliminating 20% of the inequity for each of these transitional years.  In my mind, this would allow folks to react appropriately and if that means they simply would leave teaching because the money stinks, well... welcome to teaching and maybe you should have already left. 

I'm sure my thoughts wouldn't really be that popular with others.  Heck, I'm not even sure if my wife agrees with me or not on this one.  How about you?  Am I a cold-hearted person or does something like this make sense?