Teacher pay that reaches the students

Equality is overrated, especially when it comes to education. Racial equality has often been used as an excuse to ship poor, minority and usually underperforming kids from the inner city to the suburbs to be among their higher-performing white and Asian peers. If the academic performance of the inner-city kids improves, the magic dust of integration is often cited as the primary reason.

Maybe, but I doubt it. Teacher quality always beat classmate ethnicity when it came to my learning. It was, for example, the special talent, patience and time provided by Mr. Stafford that got me through geometry. Whether the kid next to me was white, black or brown like me had little to do with it.

That a school district's best teachers and administrators tend to be in the suburbs shouldn't be surprising. It's a better gig. The schools are newer. The students tend to be better prepared. The parents show up at PTA meetings. The suburbs are perceived to be safer. And just as important to most North Carolina teachers, the pay is the same regardless of where they hold class.

Instead of assigning the best teachers to where the most challenged students live, and investing the millions needed to keep older schools safe and vibrant, school boards have nearly always found it easier -- and politically more viable -- to use racial diversity goals as a reason to move kids instead of reassigning teachers and administrators.

But that hollow tactic could come to an abrupt end if the U.S. Supreme Court rules that racially based student assignment is unconstitutional. And that's an outcome many court watchers are predicting after listening to Monday's oral arguments involving school districts in Seattle and Louisville that assigned seats to preserve preconceived and arbitrary notions of racial balance.

My reading is that if the court upholds the non-discriminatory foundation of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, nearly every school in America will become a neighborhood school -- despite strategies such as Wake County's use of socioeconomic factors in student assignments rather than race per se. If that happens, nearly every school board member will lay awake wondering how to save the students assigned to their worst schools.

The solution is simpler than most think. Invest the cash to upgrade older, inner-city schools. Then follow the lead of Guilford County, North Carolina, where top-notch instructors are paid top dollar to teach at the toughest schools.

Superintendent Terry Grier told me that under the plan the Board of Education approved in the spring, a qualified math teacher can earn up to an additional $18,000 per year by teaching in a low-performing school. And teachers have to do more than just show up. The big money rolls in when students achieve certain academic benchmarks.

The concept of paying more for skills that are in high demand apparently works as well in education as it does in the real world. A qualified teacher filled every Guilford County position eligible for the extra cash.

The Guilford plan is drawing nationwide interest, and I hope other North Carolina districts are paying attention as well. Big-time teacher pay reform is needed. Right now, art or physical education teachers are paid as if they were in just as much demand as a math or science teacher, when they're not. Grier told me the supply of art and P.E. teachers is plentiful, while qualified math and science teachers are hard to find.

Once again, a superficial adherence to equality inhibits the learning potential of our kids and restricts the ability of high-quality teachers to be rewarded according to their contribution.

Guilford County is not bound by the illusion of equality. In addition to breaking the mold of equitable teacher pay, it recognizes that some kids need more resources than others to achieve the same academic success.

An average, everyday student is the funding baseline. Students who are harder to teach, such as those with learning or physical disabilities, are funded at a higher rate. So are kids for whom English is not the native language. Thus, a school with a high population of students with greater academic needs automatically gets more than other schools.

Guilford County should be commended and encouraged. Grier and the school board there are demonstrating that common sense solutions to vexing problems are possible -- once outdated notions of education equality are shed.