I'm not sure about that. Doctors get paid a lot, but if you talk to them very few cite money as the reason they continue to practice medicine. I think increasing the compensation granted teachers could pull in talented folks who would make good teachers but also have other things that they like to do and are good at.
Raising teacher pay systematically has been tried in the United States (notably in the state of Connecticut) and has not been shown to markedly raise pupil performance. </quote>
See the video from my comment above to understand why the following obvious suggestion might not work in practice:
An economist who closely studies education policy has suggested that pay and other incentives be used to encourage the least effective teachers to seek other occupations while rewarding the most effective teachers with increased compensation and more professional support. </quote>
I know in my highschool all our science teachers had previous 'job' training. The chemistry teacher worked down in mines in (IIRC) Australia. The physics teacher had worked at a lab doing radiological work. The biology teacher actually went from field work, to university professor to highschool vice principal.
My mum is a doctor and a teacher. As in, part time practicing MD (mostly women's health). She gets a decent salary teaching in the private sector, but only really does it because she likes teaching and hates working with sick people. In the public sector, they offered her a very low salary, and told her to get her paperwork together to prove she was senior enough (after over a decade of teaching, but she hadn't kept every pay stubb).
