I think it's interesting to tie this to recent news about Khan Academy. According to various talks by Sal Khan, many kids used the free videos to educate thems

I think it's interesting to tie this to recent news about Khan Academy. According to various talks by Sal Khan, many kids used the free videos to educate themselves about math etc. to a level better than most kids achieve in a school. Better eduction, without teachers, for free. If you look at YouTube's numbers for how often those videos are watched, it's in tens or hundreds of thousand of views. I assume that most of those are from kids who watch them to learn something (I can't fathom a different reason for watching a video on multiplication). That means at least tens of thousands of kids have been educated - the model works as a mass education medium. I think that the current school model is broken for many reasons and lack of quality teachers is only a small portion of it, so discussing how to rise quality of teachers by paying them more misses the larger point. We should be thinking how to fix all of the problems. It just happens that Khan Academy model is the only realistic way (that I can see) to actually fix the system. The fix is by inverting the traditional model. Instead of one person (teacher) lecturing 20+ kids (who all differ in their current understanding of topic and how quickly they can learn new information) for an hour and giving homework assignments, the kids learn from videos, at their own pace, and teacher are there to assist when a kid reaches a stumbling block. The above description doesn't fully convey how this works but you can find out more via videos on http://khanacademy.org http://khanacademy.org. Khan Academy is already doing pilot studies with some schools and results (unsurprisingly to me) are promising.