Re: Teaching IT doesn't have enough money
Same as in any subject, IT is no different.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
However, that's not the reason. The reason is that - in nearly 20 years of working IT in schools, private and state, primary, secondary and beyond - I have met precisely two people who actually know the first thing about IT. As in, unsupervised, they could go through an install wizard without messing things up.
One was a former industrial control programmer.
One was an astrophysicist.
Literally, everyone else I see who teaches IT or computing in schools has NO CONCEPT of IT whatsoever. I know, because I deal with them every day.
If they code, they code in Scratch. Mostly, they can't even do that. They have no grasp of computer science (distinct from "computing") and no grasp of modern computing.
It's not to do with the other people all going out to industry, it's to do with having to put up with the nonsense of being a teacher, and keep up with IT, from a base of "I know how to use Ctrl-C, aren't I clever?".
I manage the IT for a private school with the first of the above as the "head of ICT", i.e. teaching IT (the other is my own brother...). We get a lot of stuff done that most people can't even dream of working IT in schools. But that took a long time to find. Over 20 years, I have had everything from a "Head of VLE" who actually didn't know what a VLE was ("It's like Google, isn't it?"), to the youngest teacher / mug in the school who, each year, got the role palmed off to them and they could barely log on themselves. Repeat next year, next year, next year, etc.
It's not that you can't be IT and teach, it's that a) You wouldn't want to teach (I briefly considered it after uni, but worked in a school for a while and quickly changed my mind) and b) the things that you are made to teach, and shown how to teach, are dull, out-of-date, poor-practice, had no relevance to modern computing (even with the new ICT curricula) and certainly won't be at all useful to the kids anyway (but then, I grew up on BBC Micros in school, so it doesn't really matter, that last bit).
Stop teaching kids that copy/paste from Google images into word is "computing", or especially "computer science", it's not. Nor is putting a loop flowchart icon into a piece of Lego software. The bar is set FAR TOO LOW still, and as such all the interesting stuff is completely out-of-syllabus anyway so decent people can't be bothered to spend their lives just teaching taht.