Six Figures -- He Says a Teacher Can Be Worth It

Brian Crosby, dressed as always in coat and tie, begins English class at Glendale’s Herbert Hoover High School right on time, with all the flair of a businessman.

“Ruminate,” the 44-year-old teacher announces dryly to a class full of sophomores, beginning a talk on the vocabulary word of the day.

“It means to ponder,” he says. “To think over.”

For much of his 14-year career in Glendale, Crosby himself has ruminated over all aspects of his job, meticulously collecting those thoughts on yellow steno pads. Last year, he went a step further and transformed his ponderings into a manuscript, which has now been put out by a small Virginia publisher.

The book’s most provocative claim is embodied in its title.

In “The $100,000 Teacher,” Crosby argues that the very best teachers deserve to be paid six-figure salaries. That claim alone has earned him praise from colleagues, garnered decent reviews (Publishers Weekly said the book offered “important ideas and a strong argument for awarding teachers the status they deserve”), and led to appearances on national radio and TV. Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust in Washington, D.C., calls Crosby’s arguments “fascinating.”

In particular, Crosby has been embraced by advocates of performance pay for teachers -- paying instructors on the basis of how well they do in the classroom. Experiments in such pay structures are taking place in a few states, but the movement has had little public support from rank-and-file teachers, who, like their unions, oppose most such schemes.

Crosby argues that many teachers should have their pay cut and he sees unions as protecting the mediocre. The National Education Assn., he thinks, should recreate itself as a professional organization like the American Medical Assn.

Six-figure salaries should be available for teachers who are demonstrably at the top of the profession -- the best 5% or so, he says. Bonuses also could be paid for hard-to-find math and science teachers and to encourage better teachers to go to poorer schools.

“There are simply not enough smart people in the field of education,” Crosby writes. “Teachers ... need to trade job security for professional integrity. There needs to be a real threat to teachers that they may lose their jobs if they don’t meet minimum standards.”

To pay for such salary increases, Crosby offers two heresies: diverting money from the federal Title I program or using funds earmarked for computers or Internet wiring of classrooms.

“For a teacher to publish a book like that -- it’s pretty unusual,” says Allan Odden, director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Wisconsin, which is studying performance pay. “You don’t hear many teachers making this argument publicly.”

That Crosby himself would like such a salary goes without saying.

While Crosby says he loves teaching, he has long expressed ambivalence about the profession. He dropped out of a certification program at Cal State Northridge when he compared the starting salary at Los Angeles Unified ($13,000 in 1982) with the $18,000 he was making doing word-processing work to put himself through school. He says he tried a number of small business ventures before noting that teachers’ starting salaries had increased to a “manageable” level. He went back to school to earn his certification and took a job teaching English at Hoover in 1989. He has never left.

Crosby is co-chairman of the English department and gets along well with colleagues, but he always stands a bit apart. He never joined the Glendale Teachers Assn., the local teachers union. (“I don’t like the idea of somebody speaking for me,” he says). He advises the award-winning student newspaper, which isn’t bashful about criticizing administrators. A portrait of Crosby’s hero, Frank Sinatra, hangs on the classroom wall.

Crosby is politic enough to say that his $67,000 salary, which includes bonuses for his master’s degree, is “better than average.” He also acknowledges that teachers’ salaries went up during the 1990s. Some teachers in America’s better-paying districts can make $100,000 a year by taking on extra responsibilities -- from teaching summer school to mentoring teachers and coaching sports teams.

But he says he is frustrated that most teachers top out on union-negotiated salary scales after a decade or so and can’t earn raises, no matter how well they do in the classroom. In 1998, he collected his frustrations into a piece that was published in The Times and other newspapers across the country. That piece drew such a response that he worked for a few years -- getting up at 4:30 a.m. to write -- on “The $100,000 Teacher.” Capital Books of Sterling, Va., published it. Sales have been slow -- about 2,200 copies.

The president of Glendale’s teachers union, Ken Niemeyer, says he knows and likes Crosby, but hasn’t read the book and is unaware of its contents. Glendale’s superintendent, Jim Brown, took Crosby out to lunch to discuss the book, but he notes that he disagrees with some of it. “It’s a good book and he’s a very engaging guy,” says Brown. “He wants more value given to the profession, and I agree with him on that.”

In his classroom, Crosby’s lessons are fast-paced. After vocabulary, he plays the overture from “The Barber of Seville”; his advanced sophomore English class is studying the structure and language of opera. He asks students to write or draw what comes into their heads as the music plays. One student imagines a runaway horse and buggy, another conjures a hawk chasing a rabbit. The class moves on to a dissection of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Recuerdo.”

It’s a lively lesson. The students seem engaged. The teacher is clearly enjoying himself. What could be better?

“Yes, I like working with the students,” Crosby says, but quickly adds: “I don’t know whether I can spend the rest of my career as a teacher. I want to be paid what I’m worth.”