My state has very good education outcomes, despite being pretty damn poor, despite a population older than florida, and despite a shitload of blue collar families with very traditional opinions. It's very simple why: We require teachers to have a master's degree in teaching plus their subject, along with ~25 training days a year, strict expectations on experience and a requirement to take 15 credits worth of additional college classes on a regular basis.
The outcome, despite individual teachers making garbage money, and making even our dumbest students take the SAT, is that 9/10 of our students get a highschool diploma, and our full state's standardized test scores are higher than lots of states where things like the SAT are opt-in, meaning only college hopeful students take it. We also have very educated, intelligent, and talented teachers. My mother was a middle school french teacher, but the same qualifications that got her that job also allow her to be a french professor in pretty much any college. My chemistry teacher was a former nuclear physicist for the navy. My english teacher was recognized as on of the best in the state, despite living in a town of 9k people. Fully half of my high school class (100 kids, varying from farm kids to rich yuppie kids) were in "advanced" or honors or AP classes, including kids you would traditionally consider "class clowns" or otherwise uninterested in education.
If you were not interested in college, my high school had an entire vocational wing, where before you graduated you could get your CDL, your heavy equipment operators certification, you could learn to cook, you could learn to knit, you could become a licensed mechanic, you could learn how to manage a greenhouse or manage an entire farm, take prep classes for business school and go to national conventions, learn how to be an IT professional from never having used a computer in your life, or literally tens of other directions to become a trained professional.