Better salaries make better teachers?

The education system in the United States is in a lamentable state, with many who speculate on how to make it better. Some opinions suggest that smaller class sizes or more technology in the classroom would be an effective way to improve public education.

Another option comes from an article I have read in the New York Times. The article is about a new charter school in New York that is experimenting with the option of paying its teachers more than twice the US average and minimizing school administration and school administration salary. The article is mostly neutral on whether this will be a successful venture or not. The article is also fairly muted on the possible consequences of this experiment.

In this new charter school, teachers will be paid a salary of $125,000 while the principal will only be paid a salary of $90,000. Teachers will be doing the work traditionally done by supporting administration, so that the number of basic administration workers will be minimal. In fact, the reason teachers will be so well paid is because the school does not have to spend money on the salaries of basic administration. This has allowed the school to be very selective in hiring teachers. How often do public schools have PhD teachers competing for job openings?

It is obvious that current administration from other schools in New York feel threatened by this new school’s set up. They are vocally critical of the low salary of the school’s principal and the lack of supporting administration.

The author uses quotations from teachers and administration in order to voice both sides of the argument debating whether or not paying teachers a higher salary and administration a lower salary will improve the educational system. But through this use of quotation, the author does an incredible job of creating an underling subtext of the desire for new education system versus the current administration’s desire not to loose its power.

The school should be a very valid experiment on whether or not a higher salaried teachers get better results from students than those paid at today’s average, because the school will mostly be serving children from low income families and class sizes will still be around thirty. This will remove the concern that high numbers of students per class is the cause of unsatisfactory education, and because students from low income families traditionally do not do well in the public education system, success or failure will be easy to measure.