Teacher Quality, Not Quantity

A NYC charter school makes the case that good teachers matter more than administrators.

Five years ago, a brand-new New York City charter school threw out the playbook. It ditched the administrators and support staff that run rampant in most schools and put the savings toward teacher pay. It turns out that paying fewer employees makes it possible to pay them better — a lot better. Who’d have thought?

The Equity Project (TEP) middle school features teacher salaries of $125,000, with returning teachers receiving a bonus of between 7 and 12 percent (based on school-wide performance). At the same time, the school asks teachers to participate in ongoing training and to shoulder outsize professional responsibilities. Critically, TEP made the numbers work while collecting only the regular funds allocated to any New York City charter school. This model has made it easy for TEP to be highly selective when hiring, to ask teachers to take on additional roles, and to retain its teachers at an unusually high rate.

The results have been impressive. Last week, research firm Mathematica released the first evaluation of TEP. TEP had enrolled its first fifth-grade class in fall 2009; and, in 2013, that first class completed TEP’s eighth grade. Mathematica’s evaluation found that TEP had positive impacts on student achievement across subjects and cohorts, and that the effects were especially large in math. Compared with similar students in New York City public schools, TEP students who attended from grade five to eight gained 1.4 years of math during each of the four years they spent at the school. The gains in English and science were less impressive but still substantial.

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