Hey, I never made $125,000!

by David Safier
A New York charter school opening in September will be paying its teachers $125,000 a year. I wrote about this months ago when the story first appeared in the NY Times, but now they've hired the teachers and are ready to go.

The school will give preference to neighborhood kids — and it's a rough neighborhood — especially low academic performers.

This is a wonderful laboratory for the idea of attracting the best teachers possible by paying them top dollar — nearly twice what New York teachers get — and getting great results in the process. I'm rooting for it to work. And if it works, I would love to see it reproduced elsewhere with the same success.

But I have concerns.

The guy who started the school conducted a nationwide search and managed to pull together what looks like a dream team of 8 teachers (he's starting small). How many schools have a guy who's worked as Kobe Bryant's personal trainer for a PE teacher? (No, I'm not kidding.) The other teachers not only have great credentials, but the founder visited them in classrooms to make sure they were master teachers as well. That's terrific, exactly what you should do. But can you pull together a team like that on a larger scale, or in other startup schools?

The founder decided he wasn't going to get all kinds of grants to make this a plush school. To compensate for the high salaries, teachers will have large classes and will have none of the usual support staff or administrators. They'll have to do it themselves. They'll be required to spend longer hours and work more days than public school teachers. How long can teachers last in that environment before they burn out?

I'm hoping the school gets press as it develops, because I want to see what works and what doesn't. If it helps the kids who go there, that's great, even if it doesn't reproduce easily. One child at a time. And if it can set up a model that can be reproduced elsewhere, so much the better. That's why I'm pro charters. I don't know if it's possible to recreate this kind of thing on a massive scale, but a few schools boosting a few kids' lives — and maybe reemphasizing the importance of great teachers in creating great education — is a wonderful thing in and of itself.