How should public education teacher salaries be determined?

Teacher's salaries are a touchy subject and everyone seems to have an opinion about it. The majority of teachers who took this poll feel that salaries should be determined by years of teaching experience. Many institutions work in this manor, with seniority on the job site or within the designated union being an important determining factor when salary negotiations are conducted. Teaching skills, special credentials, and student performance were listed as the second most popular choice down to the least popular.

Tying teacher salaries to years on the work force is the quickest and easiest way to determine compensation while still maintaining a level of fairness. Special teaching credentials or continuing education is also fairly easily documented and finding a way to compensate for those things would be relatively uncomplicated. Ranking teachers by classroom skill or student performance is open to subjective analysis and as such would be a nightmare to implement. The number of extra staff required to assess skill would put a dent in school budgets and assessing students would be extremely problematic. Would teachers receive a certain addendum to their salary for each A or B their student's received? What's stopping a teacher from handing out an extra generous proportion of As? Would all students be assessed against the same scale? How about watching for improvement trends? One students B from the failure last year is a better result that another student raising their grade from a B+ to an A.