> You could gold plate the toilets in Detroit or Baltimore or Appalachia and buy every student a MacBook Pro and pay the teachers 50% more and it won't make stu

> You could gold plate the toilets in Detroit or Baltimore or Appalachia and buy every student a MacBook Pro and pay the teachers 50% more and it won't make students want to learn. Average elementary teacher salary in North Carolina in 2013 was $45,947 times 0.5 is $22,973.50 plus $45,947 equals $68,920.50 For that kind of salary I'd go teach arithmetic at Nantahala School in the middle of the Western NC woods. Like a lot of schools in remote locations of "Appalachia" it is small-- a K-12 school with something around 100-200 students total. 200 divided by 13 would equal a pretty manageable class size. For that kind of average salary I'd bet there'd be a nice mix of similarly chipper new teachers also happy to get paid handsomely for their efforts. I'd also bet that the students would respond to a sudden influx of interest and funding in a place that otherwise looks like it was frozen in the year 1973. First lesson plan would be titled: "Math: The Details matter."