The Audacity of Hope

It also means paying teachers what they’re worth. There’s no reason why an
experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000 annually at
the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such critical fields as math and
science—as well as those willing to teach in the toughest urban schools—should be paid
even more.
There’s just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become more
accountable for their performance—and school districts need to have greater ability to
get rid of ineffective teachers.
So far, teacher’s unions have resisted the idea of pay for performance, in part because it
could be disbursed at the whim of a principal. The unions also argue—rightly, I think—
that most school districts rely solely on test scores to measure teacher performance, and
that test scores may be highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like
the number of low-income or special-needs students in their classroom.
But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with teacher’s unions, states and school
districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine test data with a
system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which
teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad). And we can make
sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.
Indeed, if we’re to make the investments required to revamp our schools, then we will
need to rediscover our faith that every child can learn. Recently, I had the chance to
visit Dodge Elementary School, on the West Side of Chicago, a school that had once
been near the bottom on every measure but that is in the midst of a turnaround. While I
was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they faced, one young teacher
mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome”—the willingness of society to
find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from
tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”
“When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not ‘these
kids.’ They’re our kids.”
How America’s economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how
well we take such wisdom to heart.
OUR INVESTMENT IN education can’t end with an improved elementary and
secondary school system. In a knowledge-based economy where eight of the nine
fastest-growing occupations this decade require scientific or technological skills, most
workers are going to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future.
And just as our government instituted free and mandatory public high schools at the
dawn of the twentieth century to provide workers the skills needed for the industrial
age, our government has to help today’s workforce adjust to twenty-first-century
realities.
In many ways, our task should be easier than it was for policy makers a hundred years
ago. For one thing, our network of universities and community colleges already exists