Adam DiPerna always had to hold it in.

As a Spanish teacher at Gerald G. Huesken Middle School in Lancaster, Pa., he’d arrive in his classroom at 7:10 a.m. each day and cannonball into a morning that left no time for a bathroom break. He’d teach back-to-back-to-back-to-back classes until his lunch period, 27 minutes during which he also had to heat and eat the food he’d brought from home, email parents about problems and absences, and field questions from students. After school, he coached wrestling, advised the student council and chaired the GHMS world language department. Work, from grading papers to preparing lessons, spilled into the evenings and weekends he wanted to spend with his wife and three kids.

For his efforts, DiPerna — with a Bucknell University diploma and a master’s degree in education — earned less than any college graduate he knew. So, last year, after a decade and a half in the classroom, he quit teaching to take a job as a sales representative at a large packaging company, trading a life of conjugated verbs for a new life of corrugated cardboard. “I wanted to be a public servant,” DiPerna, 42, told me. “I did not get into teaching to make a lot of money. But I also didn’t get into it to barely scrape by.”

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He earned more in his first partial year as a paper salesman than in his 15th year as a top-rated teacher. “I get paid more money,” he said. “And I can listen to the call of nature.”

DiPerna’s gain is America’s loss. Four years after the onset of the pandemic, students across the country are still struggling. Test scores are falling. Absenteeism is rising. Meanwhile, about 44 percent of U.S. schools face a teacher shortage.

If we’re serious about hanging on to capable educators, and attracting new ones, we should start treating them like true professionals. And one place to begin is compensation.

Why not pay America’s teachers a minimum salary of $100,000 a year?

The average annual salary for public school teachers during 2021-2022 was $66,397, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a nearly 8 percent pay cut, in inflation-adjusted terms, from a decade ago. Salary isn’t the only reason educators exit the profession. But whether they work in suburban New York or rural Mississippi, teachers earn significantly less than they could in other fields.

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The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, calls this difference the “teacher pay penalty.” EPI calculated that, in 2022, teachers earned only 74 cents on the dollar compared with comparably educated professionals. The right-leaning Hoover Institution reached a similar conclusion in its 2020 report on educator compensation, showing that, even adjusting for factors such as talent and experience, “teachers are paid 22 percent less than they would be if they were in jobs in the U.S. economy outside of teaching.”

Nothing against actuaries (median salary: $113,990), but isn’t helping a first-grader learn to read as valuable as assessing insurance premiums on your Hyundai Elantra?

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For all the education fads of the past 50 years, researchers have found that what matters most for student learning — more than reducing class size or handing out iPads — is a high-quality teacher. One study by Harvard University economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues determined that students with effective teachers in fourth grade were more likely to attend and graduate from college as young adults and to earn more than their peers during their careers.

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Some states and localities have attempted to address the compensation problem with........

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