What does a young Yalie think it takes to fix our “broken schools”? $125,000 a year for teachers.
I’m not generally a big fan of “charter schools,” which more often than not are sleazy operations that combine experimenting on other people’s children with transparent attempts to break schoolteacher unions.
But one NYC charter school really breaks the mold by offering the same argument for developing teacher talent that administrators make for themselves: you pay for it. A starting salary for teachers of $125,000 a year, to be exact.
Yeah, baby.
But here’s the great part: he’s paying his principal less than the teachers. A lot less–just $90,000 to start. Oh, double yeah, baby.
I effing love this guy.
Reaction from the administration? Predictable. Robert Logan, president of the city principals’ union, called the scheme “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” continuing, according to the New York Times, “If you cheapen the role of the school leader, you’re going to have anarchy and chaos.”
Hey, we could some of that kind of anarchy and chaos right here in higher ed.
Keep in mind that the kid–aged 31–is himself the first principal, so he’s chosen to pay himself less than the faculty. I bet he’s going to get results a lot better than a boatload of half-million-a-year university presidents who can’t graduate 50% of their students in six years.
Read the NY Times article yourself.
Enjoy. Then organize.
What if we followed this kid’s lead and jammed up those administrators the way they’ve jammed us up all these years: make ‘em contingent, make ‘em compete for janitors’ wages, and tell ‘em to ask Medicare for their chemo?
All right, I guess we couldn’t find it in ourselves to be that cruel. That’s why they get paid the big bucks–not to be smarter, or “better leaders,” but to be ethically blunt, serviceable, and willing –willing to live large and build new gyms and business facilities while the faculty starves.
Oh, Great Spirit, hear my prayer. Just give me one university president willing to follow this kid’s salary scale for her faculty and herself. Please. That would be an experiment worth watching.
Recently:
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Comments
This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 4:43 pm and is filed under "quality" and other fighting words, academic labor system, administrators, faculty on food stamps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hey Marc, thinking aloud with Craig Smith at FACE Talk, and came up with the following model that may lead to the withering away of the administration if implemented. So where are the (no doubt many) holes in it?
Oh, and did you notice the typo in your Douglass quotation? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it would have been impossible for DeMan to have been around in the mid-1850s, eh?
Bruce, man, good stuff there! I’m going to work on that column for IHE during the week. (I decided to write one about the fact that both candidates for the AAUP presidency work contingently instead for this week.)
AHA, your five or six (!) posts of the day have been removed. You remain welcome to post here generally, but I’d appreciate it if you’d “get over it,” as you say. I’m not your enemy.
If you want to stay here, you will have to cease the ad hominem attacks.
If you can’t do that, then, yes, I will ban you from here.
As for the CHE, I can’t speak for them. But yes, your posts have been flagged as problematic. So if you want to continue in unmoderated glory, you may want to tone it down a bit.