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I would love to see someone try this experiment: let's say we pay teachers $200K/year, gave them huge discretionary budgets, and put a lot of performance pressu

I would love to see someone try this experiment: let's say we pay teachers $200K/year, gave them huge discretionary budgets, and put a lot of performance pressure on them. What would happen in place like Newark? I'm not saying that's a sustainable, scalable solution, but it certainly sounds like a good use of $100M.

danielweber 12y ago
It's possible to overpay for a position. If you pay significantly over market rates, it is going to be hard to filter through all the applications, and you need a separate auditing mechanism to check for people, say, slipping $20,000 to the HR person to get themselves on the top of the pile. BTW, this is an excellent way of fairly determining if a job is overpaid or underpaid: how hard is it to find applicants? Do people camp out for 3 days beforehand for a chance to apply? In case of performance issues, do people cling to their jobs like a drowning man to a life-preserver? LATE EDIT I agree with the discretionary budgets. Each teacher should have an expense account on a credit card for when things come up and s/he needs to buy something.
- icambron 12y ago
  > It's possible to overpay for a position. No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task (e.g., in defining curriculum).
  - danielweber 12y ago
    I think it would be a great thing to try. Some people in this thread have mentioned some primary boarding schools for high-risk students. I'd want to internalize the results of those interventions, too.

danielweber 12y ago

It's possible to overpay for a position. If you pay significantly over market rates, it is going to be hard to filter through all the applications, and you need a separate auditing mechanism to check for people, say, slipping $20,000 to the HR person to get themselves on the top of the pile. BTW, this is an excellent way of fairly determining if a job is overpaid or underpaid: how hard is it to find applicants? Do people camp out for 3 days beforehand for a chance to apply? In case of performance issues, do people cling to their jobs like a drowning man to a life-preserver? LATE EDIT I agree with the discretionary budgets. Each teacher should have an expense account on a credit card for when things come up and s/he needs to buy something.

icambron 12y ago
> It's possible to overpay for a position. No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task (e.g., in defining curriculum).
- danielweber 12y ago
  I think it would be a great thing to try. Some people in this thread have mentioned some primary boarding schools for high-risk students. I'd want to internalize the results of those interventions, too.