Via Haas, Via Bill Purdy, comes Matt Miller’s Atlantic Monthly piece, A New Deal For Teachers . Miller proposes a plan to improve teacher pay in poor districts,


If the quality of urban schools is to be improved, teaching poor children must become the career of choice for talented young Americans who want to make a difference with their lives and earn a good living too. To achieve that the federal government should raise the salary of every teacher in a poor school by at least 50 percent. But this increase would be contingent on two fundamental reforms: teachers’ unions would have to abandon the lockstep pay schedules, so that the top-performing half of the teacher corps could be paid significantly more; and the dismissal process for poor-performing teachers would have to be condensed to four to six months.

I can’t argue with the proposal, but there is another problem no one wants to address which is how urban districts hire teachers. (free registration required)

Urban school districts are losing out on the best teachers because they are mired in layers of policy and practice that postpone hiring until after most of the best applicants have accepted jobs in suburban systems, a report released here last week contends.

The study by the New Teacher Project challenges the perception that city school systems are strapped for teachers because too few people want to teach in high-poverty schools. On the contrary, the authors found that with good recruiting strategies, urban districts can draw five or more applicants for every opening.

You have to have a functioning human resources department that puts a premium on hiring high quality teachers.