Ask any capitalist: If you want to attract, motivate and retain the best workers, pay them higher salaries. This isn’t exactly a new concept. It’s at the very heart of how the marketplace works. Sure, sometimes you can lure quality employees with some nice perks, a collegial staff, interesting projects and even the promise of pay-for-performance bonuses, but we live in a society where people have bills to pay — and they may even be overdue in the case of student loans — and so wages are the honey that attracts the best and the brightest.

This well-established reality is worth remembering with the recent news that the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners and the Baltimore Teachers Union have agreed to a two-year contract featuring a 3% base increase in salary each year and a slightly higher base salary for those with master’s degrees. That means the city school system will be able to offer first-year teachers pay of at least $60,000 annually which makes it competitive with most others across the state. That’s no small achievement given the big challenges Baltimore public schools face.

Some naysayers will no doubt decry the pay increase pointing out the lagging standardized test scores and lower graduation rates of students in Baltimore City Public Schools but that is exactly the point. City school teachers have a challenging job, arguably the toughest educational charge in the state. Punishing them with low salaries only makes that job less desirable and thus harder to fill with qualified instructors. This is one of the central tenets of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future which calls for greater investment in teachers. Raise the bar by raising the pay. If it works for Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car factory in Fremont, California, where salaries reportedly average over $127,000 annually, and plenty of other businesses, it can work in public schools.

Of course, we also need to be realistic. The looming multi-billion-dollar budget shortfall in Annapolis strongly suggests that some elements of the Blueprint may have to be delayed and, presumably, that includes spending more on teacher pay. Yet is anyone seriously going to suggest that a 3% pay raise is out of line given the Consumer Price Index rose 3.4% for the 12 months ending in October? If anything, North Avenue has much further to go. If the commissioners are serious about raising test scores, raising teacher salaries is practically a no-brainer.