If you want both high pay and a quality teacher, you need to pay for a private school without a union.
Actually, private schools don't have better teachers than public schools, and they pay much worse than public schools. Students at private schools score much better on standardized tests, obviously, but that has much more to do with parents who care and the school's ability to easily expel any problem students than it does with the quality of the teachers themselves. This is why the voucher program is doomed to fail. If you give vouchers to the problem students at failing public schools, the private schools will either have to kick them out or become failing schools themselves.
Anyone who has interest in this subject needs to read "Outliers" by Malcom Gladwell.
The fact that there's a strong correlation of successful students coming from wealthy, educated families is more of a byproduct of the fact that wealthy, educated parents are more willing to talk, read, and work with their children (and genes play a factor as well) as opposed to less wealthy, educated families. Basically, the biggest influence on a child's education is set before they're even born. If they're born to wealthy, smart parents, the kids are more likely to do well in school, and if you're born to poor, uneducated parents, your odds of succeeding are much lower.
The educational system can have an impact, and studies have shown that a combination of year-round schooling and challenging curriculum can greatly increases a child's chances of doing well in school and going to college, but at the end of the day, you basically have to move a mountain or be fortunate enough to be a statistical minority to actually succeed in school if you were born to the wrong family.
We can throw billions of dollars at under-performing schools and teachers, disband unions, change mandatory curricula, etc. but really, the increases you'll see won't be as dramatic as people will ultimately want for that investment. We're simply going to have to find the right balance because there is going to be a point where your ROI won't be worth it because the home lives for a lot of children aren't conducive to success.
The easiest solution to create the most rapid success would be year-round school. That has to happen at some point.
