Raising teachers’ salaries: how the aims are achieved

To meet the challenge of shortage and ageing of teaching personnel and to raise the quality of general education, regions were ordered to raise teachers’ salaries to the level of the aver-age for region’s economy. On the basis of the outcomes of sociological studies in four Russian regions the article shows that due to the very low standard for per capita funding and the scantiness of regional budgets, this measure does not solve the personnel problems but seriously increases the teaching load and can only worsen the quality of education.