I second the reply about incentives. Funding curriculum materials and professional curriculum development is often seen as more of a K-12 thing. There is not even enough at the vocational level.

If big competitive grants and competitive salaries went to people with demonstrated ability like the engineer of this viz, there would be less stem dropouts in colleges and more summer learning! Also, in technical trades like green construction, solar, hvac, building retrofits, data center operations and the like, people would get farther and it would be a more diverse bunch.