Education Spending

This is going to start with an analogy, so bear with me.

Lets say that I don't know how to perform a job. Let us also say that I am hired to do this job. Let us also suppose that my salary is $40k a year. Will raising my salary to $60k per year suddenly make me able to perform it?

If your argumentis that you cannot get people who know how to do the job for less than $60k a year, then the raise MUST include terminating the people who don't perform so that vacancies will be created to allow the qualified people be hired at the new rate.

What we tend to have in education spending is what I describe above. We are told that otherwise qualified applicants will not apply for teaching positions because the pay scales are too low. So, to attract better teachers, we much increase salaries. Fair enough, but this line of reasoning implies that the current employees are not qualified to do the job.

If giving teachers a raise came with firing all of the incompetent ones and included provisions for firing future bad teachers, I could get behind it. The problem really is that we cannot get rid of the deadwood in our system. Thanks teacher's unions!