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Paying good teachers $125,000 a year

However (you did see a however coming, didn’t you?), the premise that we can recruit such talented teachers for all public schools is false. This is not Hollywood; teaching is a mass profession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were almost 4 million teachers in 2006, and half a million will be added by 2016. A member of a mass profession should be able to succeed if she or he is an average ability, and is not endowed with an exceptional charisma, or an Ivy League education. If it requires extraordinary abilities or elite training to be a successful teacher, it simply means that we put teachers in an impossible situation. The very core concept of compulsory schooling is at the heart of the problem, not the low pay or the shortage of talent.

In other words, just because the experiment is successful (and it will be successful, no doubt), it does not mean it can be replicated on a wide scale. And it is not just because there is a limited supply of extraordinary teachers. A school’s success is one of major reasons for its success. I know it sounds tautological, but it is not. Kids make extra effort when they believe their school is better than others, and that they have a reasonable chance to be more successful than the average kid. Once all the neighborhood schools become just as good, kids will figure out their chances for upward social mobility are the same or lower than average. The motivation will diminish or disappear, because the upward social mobility cannot be universal. The best schools do not prove that everyone can be as good. They are the best, in part, because others are not so good.

To motivate children to learn, we need to start paying them, not the teachers.