A year ago, Karen Ellis was a Guilford County administrator coaching a few hundred math teachers, following a career track that often leads to a principal's office.

Today, she's back in the classroom, lured by the state's most aggressive effort yet to pay good teachers top dollar to work in schools with many poor and minority students. Ellis is among nearly 100 teachers hired this year under the new program that reaches 22 schools in Guilford, the state's third-largest district. Salaries for some teachers can reach $70,000 or higher.

As North Carolina's first big experiment with teacher pay differentials, the program is attracting state and national attention, but also opposition from the state's largest teacher organization.

North Carolina continues to struggle with a chronic shortage of qualified teachers, especially in fields such as math and science. Studies have demonstrated a close link between student performance and a teacher's skills, but the state's best teachers often work in schools that already enroll high-achieving kids.

Guilford schools range from Greensboro's affluent suburbs, where students post strong scores, to inner-city neighborhoods, where scores lag. Like many schools with disproportionate numbers of poor and minority students, turnover among teachers tends to be high and experience low.

Ellis, 35, was already thinking of returning to teaching middle schoolers when Superintendent Terry Grier announced his plan this spring to offer sharply higher pay to math teachers in 11 low-income middle and high schools, with a promise of even more based on yearly performance. Teachers in nine elementary schools also were included in the plan, though with more modest pay increases.

Ellis wanted to get back to closer contact with students, but the prospect of better pay helped clinch her decision.

"Money has to be an issue for me, and [the pay plan] helped make that decision for me," Ellis said. Her school, Hairston Middle, is one of the four middle schools in the plan. More than 80 percent of its students are poor, and a third of its teaching positions turned over in 2004-05.

Math teachers in all of the 11 low-income schools earn an extra $9,000 a year. Those who teach Algebra I earn an extra $10,000. And if their students make at least a year's worth of gains on state math exams, teachers receive a performance bonus of $2,500; if students progress by a year and a half, the teachers get a $4,000 bonus.

With extra pay from the state for her national teaching credential, Ellis' salary this year could reach nearly $60,000. But even a beginning math teacher in one of the schools can earn between $41,000 and $42,000 -- pay considered competitive with that earned by math majors in entry-level jobs in other careers.

Grier, the superintendent, thinks the extra money is making a difference. All the positions eligible for the extra pay are filled, he said, with teachers who are fully qualified. Some vacancies remain, but in such subjects as science, where the additional salary isn't available.

Still, Grier said, teaching quality in the schools has improved.

"It's not as good as we want it to be," he said, "but it's better than it was."

The extra pay is costing the district $2 million this year, with the cost projected to rise as teachers earn more for performance.

Monique Brooks, principal of Andrews High School in High Point, is convinced that the incentives make a difference. The school began the year with all its math positions filled with fully licensed staff.

"The applicant pool was much larger," Brooks said. "It makes a world of difference for students to start the year with a qualified, licensed teacher."

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