Cutting-Edge commentary on K-12 education.

A Forum on Paying Teachers Properly

For more than a century, public education has worked with a single salary schedule that compensates teachers for college credits, education degrees, and years of experience--but not for their effectiveness in the classroom.

Research shows that the degrees, courses, and experience that teachers have, beyond the first few years of teaching, are unrelated to how much their students achieve. The uniform salary schedule does not take into account that teachers work in schools offering different levels of nonmonetary benefits, such as a safe environment and students with different levels of preparation and home support. Nor does it allow for extra pay for those in hard-to-staff fields, such as math and science. But any pay- for-performance plan in K-12 education will succeed only if teachers buy into it from the start, if it is fair, and if it is embedded in a systemic reform that encourages teachers to become better at their craft.

The Moral Imperative 

Are schools effective that take character education reform seriously?

Character education has legs. It is a reform so thoroughly in the American grain, not to mention so various and adaptable, that it cannot be dismissed as just another shiny and insubstantial bubble. Moreover, the wish for schools to somehow address the sense of drift and anomie in the larger culture is not likely to abate. So the issue is not whether we will have character education, but instead, what kind we will have and what relationship it will bear to the ongoing campaign to improve children's academic skills.

Where Have All the Dollars Gone?

Reading, Pennsylvania, became the first school district in the nation to sue a state education department over the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

Reading's lawsuit might just prove that NCLB is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing: exposing struggling districts to standards of excellence that they had never even imagined. And what was first considered to be the perfect district to illuminate NCLB's defects has turned out to be a shining example of why NCLB is needed.