> It's possible to overpay for a position. No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard

> It's possible to overpay for a position. No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task (e.g., in defining curriculum).