Foundation Awards $500,000 Grants to Improve Teaching

With $500,000 grants from the Milken Family Foundation, five Arizona public schools this fall will begin a radical experiment to make teaching more attractive and rewarding.

As participants in the foundation’s Teaching Advancement Program, the schools will link all teachers’ pay to performance, greatly expand spending on training and make it easier for people to enter the classroom who haven’t necessarily been through a school of education.

They will also train top teachers to work with less experienced teachers. Eventually these so-called master teachers would be expected to earn $100,000 or more to keep them in the classroom teaching at least part of the time.

The higher salary costs for some teachers would be offset by lower pay for some beginning instructors and aides, so the overall cost of operating schools would not need to go up dramatically.

Concern over teacher quality has risen to the top of the education agenda. That has led to calls for higher pay, more testing of teachers, more vigorous recruitment and creation of positions that raise pay in return for greater responsibility.

Those ideas are being tried across the country, but the Milken plan, unveiled Wednesday at a two-day education conference, is the only model that incorporates all of those reforms at once.

Lowell Milken, the foundation’s co-chairman and the architect of the model, said it seeks to motivate the best teachers by rewarding them for their efforts.

“This is a whole new way of looking at schools and saying, ‘How are we going to use the human capital here in the most efficient way?’ ” Milken said.

In most jobs, he said, people are rewarded for working hard and achieving results, while teachers’ pay is largely based on seniority. “Why would we ever think that somehow the education system would operate under a whole different set of principles from everything else we’re accustomed to in society?” he said.

The idea of linking performance to pay has been widely discussed but only rarely used in education. It is on the table in current labor negotiations in Los Angeles but is given little chance of becoming part of a final contract proposal.

Although the Teaching Advancement Program was generally praised, some education leaders said it was too ambitious to be widely adopted.

To that, Milken had this rejoinder: “The fact is, we’ve had a lot of reforms in education over the past few decades and they’ve done very little. So, why not try to do something that might actually have an effect?”