$125K to Teach Future Highschool Dropouts

Only 32 percent of Black men graduated from New York City public schools
on schedule in 2006.

Only when we decide that we are teaching young people, young urban people
with the sole intent of liberating them, will we have any success as educators.

Apparently, there is a school in New York that thinks that paying teachers
$125K per year will make substantial gain in transforming the lives of
future drop outs. Cristine Gralow writes in the New York Times,

The Equity Project Charter School (TEP) will open in September 2009 in Manhattan’s Washington Heights community, and it will aim to enroll middle school students at risk of academic failure. Students with the lowest test scores will be given admissions priority. In order to recruit the country’s top teachers to work with these at-risk students, the school’s founding principal will cut administrative costs and put a higher percentage of the school’s public funding into teacher salaries. He’s also seriously raising teacher qualifications, offering teachers a potential $25,000 bonus, and expanding the school day and work year for teachers. The principal will make $90,000. There will be no vice principal.

Only then will they become critical thinkers who feel that they can make a
contribution to society. In Living for Change, Grace Bogg's
discuses what young people need in order to be engaged in school.
She writes,

Meanwhile, watching high school dropouts hanging around on our corners, as our communities deteriorated, I began to talk less about education to govern and more about creating a system of education to address the needs of these young people and of our communities at the same time. Instead of seeing our schools as institutions to advance individual careers, I argued we must start turning them into places to develop our children into responsible citizens- by convolving them in community building activities, such as planing community gardens, preparing school and community meals, building playgrounds, cleaning up our rivers and neighborhoods. In this way our children will learn through practice, which is the best way to learn.

Unless you are educating oppressed people with intention of liberating them
all efforts will be unsustainable. That is not so say that there will be no success,
what ever that may or may not mean, what I am saying is that paying more
isn't scalable, and it isn't sustainable.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere gets to the heart of the matter
when he writes,

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing deposits.

It is not surprising the the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable manageable beings. The more students work at storing deposits entrust to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness from which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world...The capability for the banking education to minimize or annul the students creative power to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor see it transformed. The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation.

No pedagogy [way/method of teaching] which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among oppressors. the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.

While I think its commendable that the school wants to pay the teachers more,
teacher pay does not address the fact that a banking system of education
will only produce people who only survive, not people who are critical
thinkers who feel that they can make a contribution to society

Most urban public school's aren't anything but jails with training wheels.

I don't believe you, you need more people.