[xur17]

> The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.

Agreed - to me it seems like paying teachers more is a tool. This enables you to offer incentives to improve student performance, but it also enables you to raise the bar (in some way) when hiring to get better teachers. If you just raise existing salaries across the board, you'll see no immediate change other than more people applying to be teachers. In theory if you have a good way of filtering for the "best", you might be able to then slowly overtime replace your existing teachers with (on average) better teachers.

[WalterBright]

Once hired, good people still need incentives to perform. This is well understood in the private sector.