I think this is true, and it's something I have a lot about. What behaviors would this reward system actually incentivize?

I figured there would be two strategies teachers could use to maximize profit. One would involve as you said, focusing on the top students and taking them under your wing, making sure YOU are the one who teaches them as much as possible.

The other would be to instead focus on motivating and effectively teaching as many kids as humanly possible, regardless of their perceived potential, and simply playing the odds.

Other possible strategies would involve apprenticeship, in which your apprentice's work would effectively pay for your retirement, or company training, in which even if an employee was not loyal, you could still make money from them after they left you.

I figured that these strategies were close enough to how I would desire teaching to work anyway, that it was worth a shot.

One downside would be that it would cause teachers to compete to teach kids, instead of working together to get the best learning outcome.

That being said,, there's a lot being taken for granted above, not the least of which is that people won't figure out some way to game the system. I'm open to split testing this approach, like I am with everything in Docademy. Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate? I haven't hit upon any yet, but I'm open to any suggestions thrown my way.