It's about the marketplace.

Supply and demand, price and competition: these are the simple concepts of labor economics. Do your job well and be rewarded. Have specialized skills to do a job others can't and opportunities will knock at your door. Seems like a familiar formula, right? For most of us, it is. But not so for teachers.

Teacher quality and teacher pay have historically been disconnected and continually debated. But as this spot-on article from The News Tribune states, higher pay for some teachers as a means of reform is not about education but about politics.

For a moment, let's forget that research shows nothing has a bigger impact on student performance than the quality of instruction and the teacher leading students in the classroom. Forget that middle school teachers are ill-prepared in math and that at the end of the day, the truth is, all teachers are not created equal.

Instead, let's do as Peter Callaghan suggests. "Let's do the math."

"The labor market reality is that teachers have very different opportunity costs and these have profound impact on the ability of schools to recruit and retain teachers," wrote Dan Goldhaber, a research associate professor at the UW Evans School of Public Affairs.

In other words, employees with math and science skills can make more money outside of public education. So we have an education system that won't pay math and science teachers more and a competitive marketplace that will.

You don't have to be a mathematician to solve this problem.