The Missing Piece in Education Refrom
Dana Goldstein has a post at Tapped documenting where exactly Michelle Rhee is getting the money to pay teachers on her non-tenured “Green” track up to $130,000 in salary. It turns out that, as everyone expected, Rhee expects to get the money get from philanthropists interested in education reform, namely Eli Broad and Bill Gates.
And while I think Broad and Gates are doing a good thing by providing the money to support an alternative model of paying teachers, this method of funding is somewhat problematic. It will probably work out for DC for as long as Rhee, or a Rhee-like successor, very publicly push a reform message and try to make DC ground zero for rather radical policy changes, which would also end up directing a lot of attention towards the work being done by theses philanthropic organizations. But the problem is that you’re not going to find a Gates or a Broad in every school district willing to pony up the necessary funds to increase teacher pay.
While I wouldn’t mind higher taxes or an increase in overall education funding to pay teachers more, I imagine that conservatives, who always talk about how much they like Rhee and Joel Klein and who generally put themselves in the reform camp, won’t be happy when they realize that paying teachers more means spending more on education. As I wrote back in November:
That’s because, as of now, the huge pay increases that Rhee is giving to good teachers without tenure (along with the rest of her experimenting) are being funded by private donors. There is obviously a problem with scaling that model up. If more school districts and states were to get on the Rhee program, it would mean more money for schools. And not just that internet money, but tax money. At that point, expect Republicans to stop pretending they support liberal school reform and start carping about vouchers again.
I think that’s all still true today, and will be for the foreseeable future.
