Send this to Rick Snyder!

Long time teacher cheerleaders Dave Eggers (What is the What, The Wild Things) and Ninive Clements Calegari (co-founders of 826 National) offer a solid op-ed, "The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries," in Sunday's NY Times. To attract, and keep, better teachers, the US ought to model what Finland, Singapore, and South Korea do:

Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do.

And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it’s 1 percent per year. In Finland, it’s 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.

How do we pay for it? Same way we've paid for wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We just do it.