I appreciate your sentiment, and your concerns about a future of underpaid teachers isn't far off. But to be honest, at this point in my career, I would compromise with funding education enough to pay for adequately staffing a school with special education and bilingual education teachers, not to mention all the auxiliary positions that schools need to function. I can't count how many times the SpEd teacher was pulled from my class (a class that sped students have required minutes with a sped teacher) because they had to cover another class, or how many "aides" I had in my classroom that probably should have been a certified sped teacher. To be honest, I would settle with funding education adequately enough to hire enough teachers to get my class sizes under 30. There is a huge difference between teaching in a room with 30 eleven year-olds and 26 eleven year-olds. Now imagine having 35 eleven year-olds. Yeah. You know what, keep the raise, it's a bandaid. What good is an extra $200/ month if I have to go into a dirty classroom with 35 kids (10 SpEd/5 Spanish speakers/1 Swahili speaker), no ESL teacher and a SpEd teacher that leaves 20 minutes into class?