Manhattan Charter School Will Pay Teachers Six Figures

Founded by Yale graduate Zeke M. Vanderhoek, the Equity Project Charter School in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City aims to discover if stellar teachers are the key to quality education. The middle school will open in September 2009, with a small, highly paid, highly qualified staff. To recruit and keep the country’s best teachers, the starting teacher’s salary is  $125,000, with a potential second-year bonus of $25,000 based on student performance. Eliciting good academic achievement will be a challenge: priority in selecting students for the school was given to poor academic performers and children from low-income families.

The New York Times reports that Vanderhoek, who will be the school’s principal with a salary of $90,000, personally selected each teacher on the eight-member team and interviewed 100 of the 600 applicants to the school. The school has chosen to focus solely on teacher quality as a kind of experiment. Whereas other charter schools have elected to have small class sizes, teachers at the Equity Project will have 30 students, which is actually more than an average middle school class in New York City.

The Equity Project Web site says that the school used three principles in recruiting potential teachers: “Rigorous Qualifications, Redefined Expectations, & Revolutionary Compensation.” In addition to possessing excellent subject knowledge, teachers must show the ability to develop innovative curricula and a unique knack for engaging students. Vanderhoek visited teachers in their classrooms during the application process, and the Times says that he looked for moments when students are so engrossed in what they were learning that they “forget they are in class.”

When Barack Obama appointed Arne Duncan as education secretary, education reform became a top priority. Concern about the effectiveness of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy has been mounting, and the question of how to evaluate student performance is still unresolved. The primary quandary concerns how well standardized tests reflect progress and learning. But Duncan also plans to focus on better teacher quality. He called education reform a matter of “civil rights.”

One potential strategy for reforming education is school vouchers, which allow students to use government money to attend a private or parochial school. The vouchers are an alternative to publicly sponsored charter schools, which often are in high demand and considered to be superior to regular schools. In May 2009, a Georgia state senator proposed issuing statewide school vouchers.

Typically, it is hard to recruit good teachers because highly qualified people often choose professions where they can earn a more competitive salary. The same problem also occurs in the medical fields; today, few medical students are electing to become general practitioners because of low pay.