I was rather surprised when a family friend of mine told me that she takes in around a a $100k yearly. She is a middle school teacher(~10 years in the bay area). So teachers in many places actually get paid a good salary.
Teachers in many areas do not get paid well. What is good for NYC/SF/DC does not represent the rest of the country. I believe teachers make 35k on average. I had a friend teach a high school in the Appalachians and they started him at 24k. And they really had to scrimp, save, and beg the feds to pay him considering the avg income for his area was less than half of that.
If you are a teacher with degrees and certificates, then 100k in a major metro, plus 10 years would be about correct.
Additionally you didn't specify what she teaches. Science and math teachers are harder to come by and their salary reflects that. My middle school science teacher was plucked from a high school, which had plucked her from a local college. She was one of the highest paid teachers in the school because she had experience and a load of degrees. She was working towards her doctorate when I left. She didn't come right at and tell me what she made, but the Benz in parking lot and the neighborhood she lived in gave me a clue.
Also, this was a magnet school so the teachers tend to be of higher qualifications than a typical high school.
Plus people seem to confuse the union with government a lot. In government you get paid in bands. Bands are based on the type of job, your accreditation, and your seniority. You can do the bare minimum and stay at the bottom of your band, until you are pushed up to the next band based on some formula, or you can do more and constantly stay in the top of your band and get pushed through quickly. The union probably doesn't have a lot of say in how much teachers get paid. They do have a big influence on how the workplace is run (ie. how late they must stay, when breaks can be done, etc).
Your friend may be a good teacher, but I bet the reason she's getting $100k is because she's been there 10 years - and possibly because she has a masters in education (which has been shown to have little or no correlation to being an effective teacher).
The quote from the article that struck me was this one:
“This is the first time in 30 years of teaching that anybody has been really interested in what I do.”
That's the really terrible combination of teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy. Bad teachers can't be fired, good teachers aren't paid more, and the way you get ahead is by sticking around for your automatic raises and early retirement.
Teaching has very strong unions. Actually that's the main problem. Teachers here in the UK are effectively unsackable, yet at the same time their jobs are hell because the unions insisted on all sorts of trendy Marxist nonsense being taught at teacher training colleges.
