At Charter School, Higher Teacher Pay

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Zeke M. Vanderhoek, creator of a charter school opening in 2009.

This is really an amazing experiment--significantly higher teacher pay for 5th-8th grade teachers—$125,000.00 and performance bonuses. I quote: "The school will open with seven teachers and 120 students, most of them from low-income Hispanic families. At full capacity, it will have 28 teachers and 480 students. It will have no assistant principals, and only one or two social workers. Its classes will have 30 students. In an inversion of the traditional school hierarchy that is raising eyebrows among school administrators, the principal will start off earning just $90,000. In place of a menu of electives to round out the core curriculum, all students will take music and Latin. Period."

This sounds exciting.

-Angela

At Charter School, Higher Teacher Pay


By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Published: March 7, 2008

Would six-figure salaries attract better teachers?

A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will
test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly
higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.
The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay
teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That
is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher
earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and
higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most
generous districts nationwide.
The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high
salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the
conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not
star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial
ingredient for success.
“I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and
nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of
students and give them all the technology in the world,” said Mr. Vanderhoek,
31, a Yale graduate and former middle school teacher who built a test
preparation company that pays its tutors far more than the competition.
In exchange for their high salaries, teachers at the new school, the Equity
Project, will work a longer day and year and assume responsibilities that
usually fall to other staff members, like attendance coordinators and
discipline deans. To make ends meet, the school, which will use only public
money and charter school grants for all but its building, will scrimp
elsewhere.
The school will open with seven teachers and 120 students, most of them from
low-income Hispanic families. At full capacity, it will have 28 teachers and
480 students. It will have no assistant principals, and only one or two social
workers. Its classes will have 30 students. In an inversion of the traditional
school hierarchy that is raising eyebrows among school administrators, the
principal will start off earning just $90,000. In place of a menu of electives
to round out the core curriculum, all students will take music and Latin.
Period.
While the notion of raising teacher pay to attract better candidates may seem
simple, the issue is at the crux of policy debates rippling through school
systems nationwide, over how teachers should be selected, compensated and
judged, and whether teacher quality matters more than, say, class size.
Mr. Vanderhoek’s school, which was approved by the city’s Education Department
and the State Board of Regents, is poised to be one of the country’s most
closely watched educational experiments, one that could pressure the city and
its teachers’ union to rethink the pay for teachers in traditional schools.
“This is an approach that has not been tried in this way in American education,
and it opens up a slew of fascinating opportunities,” said Frederick M. Hess,
director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“That $125,000 figure could have a catalytic effect.”
Yet the model is raising questions. Will two social workers be enough? Will even
the most skillful teachers be able to handle classes of 30, several students
more than the city average?
“I think they’ll have their hands full,” said Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton
professor who studies the economics of education. “Paying teachers above market
rate for hard-to-staff schools makes sense, don’t get me wrong. The question is,
‘How much do you want to tilt in that direction?’ ”
Michael Thomas Duffy, the city’s executive director for charter schools, said
that even some Education Department staff members were skeptical, wondering,
“If you’re putting all of your resources into teachers in the classroom, are
you shorting some of the other aspects of what a good school requires?”
Mr. Vanderhoek won approval for the school after presenting city and state
officials with a detailed proposal and budget. Mr. Duffy said the school could
have a “tremendous impact” throughout the country. “If the department and the
chancellor didn’t feel that this had a likelihood of success, we wouldn’t have
approved it.”
The school’s students will be selected through a lottery weighted toward
underperforming children and those who live nearby. It has generated so much
buzz with its e-mail blasts and postings on education and employment Web sites
that its voicemail message now implores prospective hires to please, make
inquiries by e-mail.
“People are sort of stunned,” Mr. Vanderhoek said.
Ernest A. Logan, president of the city principals’ union, called the notion of
paying the principal less than the teachers “the craziest thing I’ve ever
heard.”
“It’s nice to have a first violinist, a first tuba, but you’ve got to have
someone who brings them all together,” Mr. Logan said. “If you cheapen the role
of the school leader, you’re going to have anarchy and chaos.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, called the
hefty salaries “a good experiment.” But she said that when teachers were not
unionized, and most charter school teachers are not, their performance can be
hampered by a lack of power in dealing with the principal. “What happens the
first time a teacher says something like, ‘I don’t agree with you?’ ”
Mr. Vanderhoek spent three years teaching at Intermediate School 90 in
Washington Heights through Teach for America, which places recent college
graduates in challenging schools. He started tutoring to supplement his salary
and created a test preparation company called Manhattan GMAT in 2000.
The secret to the company’s success, he said, was to pay tutors $100 an hour as
well as bonuses, compensation that was several times more than other companies
paid.
Mr. Vanderhoek is trying to raise money to lease space in the neighborhood and
build a permanent building. But he has made a strategic decision to cover other
expenses with city, state and federal money, plus a few grants. “We’re saying,
‘Look, we can do it on public funding, and we want to inspire other people to
do it on public funding.’ ”
The school’s teachers will be selected through a rigorous application process
outlined on its Web site, www.tepcharter.org, and run by Mr. Vanderhoek. There
will be telephone and in-person interviews, and applicants will have to submit
multiple forms of evidence attesting to their students’ achievement and their
own prowess; only those scoring at the 90th percentile in the verbal section of
the GRE, GMAT or similar tests need apply. The process will culminate in three
live teaching auditions.
Among those who have applied are a candidate who began teaching in the 1960s,
founded a residential school for troubled adolescents, has a Ph.D in Latin and
is working on a scholarly translation; and a would-be science teacher who has
taught for more than a dozen years at some of the country’s top private
schools.
Claudia Taylor, 29, applied to the Equity Project even though, she said, the
thought of leaving the Harlem Village Academy, the charter school where she
teaches reading, “breaks my heart.”
“I’m tired of making decisions about whether or not I can afford to go to a
movie on a Friday night when I work literally 55 hours a week,” Ms. Taylor
said. “It’s very frustrating. I’m feeling like I either have to leave New York
City or leave teaching, because I don’t want to have a roommate at 30 years
old.”
Ms. Taylor hesitated before applying, because the salary “almost doesn’t seem
real.” Then she thought back on her three years teaching in the traditional
public schools and determined that it could be, saying, “There is definitely a
lot of money that you saw being wasted.”
Mr. Vanderhoek said he planned to be principal for at least four years. After
that, who knows? He could be promoted to teacher.