A story last week from California describing how the top executives of the bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric Co. would be allowed to receive $17.5 million in bonuses as incentives to stay is a reminder of an important truism of business: You have to pay for talent, even if that talent doesn’t appear as forcefully as you might like. CEOs and other top officials are paid well because if they are not, according to this truism, they will go elsewhere.

The observation could well be accurate, but does not seem to arise in a related situation in Maine and the rest of the nation. The top executives of classrooms – teachers – are in short supply and are expected to be in shorter supply in the next decade. But instead of being paid more, U.S. teachers, according to a new study, are actually receiving less compared with the growth in national income and less than their counterparts in many industrialized nations even though U.S. teachers spend more time in the classroom.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released the study Monday, showing that in only a few countries, such as Turkey, Greece, New Zealand and Denmark, is public spending for education keeping up with overall economic growth. Like nurses and licensed day care providers, teachers in the United States are in demand but the market apparently doesn’t work for them the way it does for CEOs.

Instead, lawmakers wring their hands and talk about getting more training programs going rather than seeing increased pay as a way draw people into these fields. Imagine the Legislature establishing training programs to produce more executives because the alternative would be paying them more.

Some might look at the employee shortages in traditionally female-dominated professions and see a connection with the lower pay. Lawmakers, if given enough time, surely can come up with other explanations for why they would rather talk about mandated overtime for nurses or streamlined entry requirements for would-be teachers instead of concluding that pay matters.

One observation from the OECD study was that, “education brings large rewards for individuals in terms of employment prospects.” Having helped introduce students to those rewards, teachers rightfully may wonder whether a share should come their way, too.