Morale and merit (pay): A lesson on how to keep the best teachers.

Editorial

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Monday, December 26, 2005

A FEW WEEKS back, we found ourselves at the Delta Preparatory School in Helena, and, by pure chance, happened to be there on a day when the school’s founder, director, principal and leader, Scott Shirey, received a Milken Award. 

A great and inspiring time was had by all. 

Impressed as we were by Director/ Motivator Shirey and his students, something else about the visit stuck with us: the teachers! They seemed so darn young and so darn devoted and so darn in charge. And did we mention how young they were? And eager? And committed? 

Watching them in action—even during a school assembly—we had little doubt why the students’ test scores have been going up faster’n you can say SAT. 

It’s an old, old formula for success: Mix dedicated teachers with a great principal, add structure and parental involvement, stir with innovations and just enough classroom autonomy, top with a dollop of well-deserved reward, and you get a top-notch school. It may be the only can’t-miss recipe when it comes to education. 

After the assembly, we were talking to the development director at Delta Prep. (It says something about a school when everybody who works there wants to talk about working there.) She told us about a teacher who’d found Delta Prep through the Teach for America Program. TAP. 

You may have heard of TAP. It’s like a Peace Corps for schools. The program attracts new college grads who are still trying to figure out what they want to do in life, or where they want to attend grad school, or if they want to attend grad school, but know deep down inside that they want to help, to do something. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves and their career. They want to, as the kids say, Give Back. 

So the Teach for America program lets them give back to the least among us—schools in the poorest school districts out in the hard-scrabble parts of the country, places where so many newly accredited teachers fear to tread. And it’s a two-year commitment. But the program doesn’t just plant a college grad in front of a class and wish him luck. It trains the teacherto-be first. And it clearly trains him well, because the TAP program has been around for 15 years now, and it has an impressive record of turning out teachers who stay teachers. Or become principals. Plus, the program has become so popular with the campus crowd that it’s turning applicants away. Only the risen cream makes the cut. 

That teacher the development director was bragging on? Well, his two years came and went. But he stayed on. And he has no plans to leave any time soon. Neither does Scott Shirey, another Teach-for-America product. At last report, he was looking to buy a house in Helena. 

All this came to a cluttered mind the other day while leafing through the justreleased booklet, Reforming Education in Arkansas by the Koret Task Force, an outfit of education mavens affiliated with the Hoover Institution. They were given the go-ahead by Mike Huckabee to do a soup-to-nuts evaluation of public education in Arkansas. And then the Guv had the courage to release the results. 

Mixed in with Koret’s warts-and-all critique (to no one’s surprise, Arkansas still isn’t near where we need to be) there are some recommendations that sound familiar, since we ourselves have been pushing them for a while. Like extra pay for teachers based on their students’ performance. 

This extra pay would reward teachers based on results. Not just raw test scores, but the progress a student makes. It’s a good way to separate the best teachers from the time-servers, those burned-out lifers who’ve come to rely on across-the-board pay raises and the unions to protect them from being exposed as poor teachers. That way, only the students suffer. 

The success of the Teach for America Program proves that there’s more to attracting the best than pay-for-performance. There are the intangibles that make a great workplace a great workplace. 

Like morale. Like the freedom to try new things. Like camaraderie and a sense of community. Like working for a Scott Shirey. 

Those things can’t be bought. And they probably can’t be measured just by test scores. (Although surely test scores can reflect the skills of teachers and overall success of a school. Just look at the impressive scores of Delta Prep’s kids.) Extra pay for performance also boosts morale. It helps a young teacher stay on top of his game when the shine wears off and the new grows old, and age-and-experience chip away at that bright-eyed, fresh-fromcollege, save-the-world idealism. 

Even the best teachers can use some bucking up. And what better way to buck ’em up than with a system that rewards competence? We’ve noticed that when somebody gets a raise, it’s not just the money that’s appreciated, but the recognition for a job well done. Good teachers deserve to be recognized with more than words. And there are few expressions more sincere than cash on the line. 

Extra pay for performance isn’t just a good way to attract the best and brightest. The very best teachers—the teachers you still remember all these years later—tend to see their profession as a vocation, a calling. But they still like to feel appreciated for all they do. And while it’s impossible to put a dollar figure on great teachers, we could show we know they’re great. In the most sincere way.