If you value education, why does your state have unions that force pay based on seniority and not outcome?
However, pay based on outcome is really hard to get right, especially for something like teaching. What is the outcome? Well, what we really want is adults who can contribute to society. But that's too hard to measure and would take too long, so we need a proxy. Anything to do with tests is tough: not only do you have to (somehow -- this isn't a solved problem) calibrate for the students themselves to suss out what the teacher's contribution is, but there's immense pressure to teach to the test and prep for the test specifically, even at the expense of actual education. Not nothing, but imperfect. Other measures suffer from the same basic problem: any measure that becomes a goal ceases to be a useful measure because people optimize for that.
So what's an alternative? Maybe it's to make teaching a respected, well-paid profession where you have stability and advancement. One good way of doing that is by having clear seniority-based pay, not because it reflects how good at the job you are, but because that attracts teachers who are serious about making it a career and establishes it as a mainstream, lucrative profession.
But I don't know. This stuff is all extremely hard, and I don't think anywhere has figured it all out.
Teaching jobs don't exist in a vacuum, and the reason to have pay based on seniority is simple. If you want competent people to go into the profession from the start, they need to know they have a steady and worthwhile career. If you can provide that, like NJ does, (and where I live in NY does) then you might actually get good teachers. If instead you make it unappealing and difficult because of uncertainty, you will only get people who are incompetent and have no other options.
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
Edit: why the downvotes? If you are uncertain of or unamenable to the way outcomes are measured, vouchers are a reasonable solution that puts the power in your hands
An extremely significant part of how parents choose schools is based on the social groups they want their kids associating with.
99% of the academic success of private schools is attributable to their ability to exclude poorly performing students, not some magical pedagogical secret.
It’s the same exact reason why homes of equivalent quality in two different districts of the same school system may have 2x or 3x price differentials. Because parents pay hundreds of thousands so their kid doesn’t sit next to a kid with parents who can’t afford the same.
If schools are unwilling or unable to provide a stable learning environment then parents move on. There has been a lot of ink spilled on exactly why this is, including the racial and religious issues you allude to, but the brute fact is that in many communities families flee or switch to religious school because their children suffer violence at the hands of their fellow students.
IMO this entire problem was caused by segregating our schools to begin with. The problem of misbehaving kids isn't going to be fixed by giving them free vacation on the streets. They need to see with their own eyes that their behavior isn't acceptable, and that means putting them in environments where they are outsiders. Kids are a product of their social environment, full stop.
If you have to teach the kids who need help, you get poor marks when some of them inevitably fail.