Charter cash

"Yeah. Don’t teach – you’ll never have any money.”\nAh. The famous rebuttal. Ever notice how the phrase “noble profession” is a code for “you’ll be broke if you do this”? \nWhat if you didn’t have to be?\nPublic education revolutionary Zeke M. Vanderhoek wants to find out. A Yale grad and former middle school teacher, Vanderhoek is the gear-mover behind the Equity Project Charter School in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. The school will pay all of its teachers $125,000 per year and allot bonuses based on teacher performance. The school is considering only the best of the best applicants – it won’t even look at first-year teachers’ applications – and has extremely high expectations. The teachers’ standardized test score criteria, for example, is expected to be in the 90th percentile or above in the verbal section of the GRE or GMAT.\nVanderhoek’s conviction is that a higher salary will attract better candidates to teaching positions, which will lead to better education across the board, especially in lower-income neighborhoods such as Washington Heights, which are historically harder to staff with capable teachers. His reasoning? \n“The money is a signifier,” he said. “Because money, in our culture, is a signifier of how jobs are valued, and right now schools are telling teachers that they are not valued.”\nThis makes, frankly, a whole lot of sense. If an overall improvement in public education is our goal – especially in the lower-income areas where improvement is most needed – then the first step should be with the teachers themselves. As it stands now, smart college graduates are faced with disincentive after disincentive to go into education (especially public education), when they could be compensated volumes more to go into ... well, anything else. As a result, our kids in public schools are getting far lower-quality teaching than they would be if the incentive structure for able college grads were improved.\nAnd it’s already worked on a smaller scale: Vanderhoek, before piloting the charter school project, was the successful entrepreneur behind Manhattan GMAT, a firm he started from scratch and crafted into the nation’s largest testing and tutoring service. His philosophy was simple: attract the best tutors by paying far more than the competition. \nIf we’re serious about improving our public school system, then before vying for more laptops or a more rigorous focus on standardized testing, we should make a statement to potential educators that says, “Hey, you’ll be appreciated here.” A salary of $125,000 a year will certainly make a huge chunk of graduating college students think again about waving off education for monetary reasons (current average middle school teacher salary: $49,470).\nIf we really view teaching as such a “noble profession” and are serious about improving educational quality, then we should start thinking about compensating educators in ways that reflect this belief.