I was going to comment on this in my previous post, but it was already long enough. Really, this whole derailing of this thread could be moved to a different forum, but whatever.
I hate the entire concept of a living wage for teachers. Teachers should be venerated. We should want the very best minds teaching our children, so pay them enough to attract them. I went to HS in a relatively affluent town in Connecticut. In a class of 330, about 20% went to Ivy League schools or equivalents. 98% of my graduating class started college the next fall. It was mostly the 3rd quartile kids that were going into Education.
I think that there are great teachers everywhere. I think that many teachers follow that path because they feel called to it, whether they started in Education or gravitated towards it. Now, that being said, I think with the higher salaries, there is more competition for each available position, and there is significantly more scrutiny on performance, so the chances of having a subpar teacher is less.
I have always felt that if we want the brightest minds teaching our kids, then we need to pay them equivalently to what they'd be able to make in the private sector. I think NTHS approaches this as much as I've seen anywhere. It's hard to differentiate the test scores at NT based on socioeconomics or educational opportunity, but NT is ranked pretty highly nationally in comparison to other open enrollment campuses.
NTHS has about 4,000 students on two campuses. There's a freshman-only campus, and a 10-12 grade campus. The resources these kids have is incredible. I would equate NTHS to a community college, and the size can be overwhelming for some kids. Because there are so many kids it can be hard to make certain sports teams or academic teams or other activities. However, there are more club activities and intramural opportunities that we had at Tech when I was there. I think NTHS does a fantastic job of not losing kids in the cracks. This school has always been on the cutting edge of teaching techniques, and were one of the first schools to implement SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) into their curriculum.
Having said all this, we moved to Chicagoland with my oldest was going into 8th grade. We didn't intend to be in this school district, but when I changed jobs in 2014 and started working in the western suburbs, I decided to commute over an hour each way every day to keep my kids in this district. I don't know if it will make a difference, but who doesn't want to give their kids every opportunity for success.
@Skeptic I wouldn't call it luck; it was a conscious decision to live a more modest life to provide more opportunity for our children's education.