Merit pay for teachers sounds good, but would probably be a disaster. The ones denied it would immediately go to court, and school districts would have to spend a fortune defending themselves. Parents of kids assigned to teachers who don't get merit pay would sue the school district for sticking their kids with the dud teachers. The best course would be to simply fire the bad ones, but that's proven to be impossible as well. Pam and P2b are still "teaching". I don't believe there is any way to correlate quality of public education with how much is spent on it, because you cannot get rid of the bad teachers or disruptive students, and you cannot enforce discipline in the urban jungle schools.