> I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious why this could not work?
It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget.
> And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results.
This is an important point. $100,000+ per year is not unheard of for teachers in Ontario (conveniently public sector incomes >$100,000 are required to publicly disclosed[1]), and they have problems with graduates not having even basic literacy and numeracy skills[2].
It's a very recent thing for teachers to be able to reach that, usually by hitting the top of the seniority scale and qualifications scale, or having some extra paid work (e.g. being a department head).
If the fully loaded headcount cost of a CPS teacher isn't north of $100,000 I'll be pretty surprised. CPS teachers are well-compensated. Their median salary is $71,000, and they get good health insurance and a defined-benefit pension plan.
I live in Oak Park, just on the outskirts of Chicago, and the median teacher cash comp at my kids' high school is something like $120,000.
I’m not an expert in the matter, but I can imagine it could attract individuals that desire high wages or high-status work. Regardless of how genuinely invested or enthusiastic they are about the impact of being a teacher.
Not that we shouldn’t compensate teachers well (as they deserve it) but I can imagine that a high compensation with strict requirements could introduce a “measure becoming a target and no longer a measure” situation.
It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget.
And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. American teachers are well paid compared to other OECD countries where students do better: https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-....