Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is America

I made it to Atlanta and then to Athens, where I've enjoyed spending the last three days catching up with friends and doing what I can to help recruit for Teach For America.

While staying with my friend Casey, I came across a book he was reading. Written by former Clinton budget official Matthew Miller, The Two Percent Solution posits a radical shift in national priorities. Miller argues that many of the current national crises we experience can be solved by dedicating two percent of our national income (gross domestic product) to putting our money where our mouths are.

I am particularly galvanized by his incredible platform for education.

Miller correctly identifies teacher quality as the defacto hindrence to student performance. He points out that this problem does not intend to demean the outstanding teachers who have dedicated their lives to the profession and produce excellence, but rather narrows his focus to those teachers who, based on their qualifications, are basically being hired to babysit.

Moreover, Miller argues that despite urban schools that are too often targeted as the reason for our substandard state averages, "when we are failing 10 million poor children, the problem is national."

Miller argues for $30 billion to create a system of enhanced teacher pay based on experience, student performance and content knowledge. Teachers in poor schools would have their salaries rasied 50%; conditional upon teacher unions agreeing to raise the salaries of the top half of performers another 50%, as well as streamlining the dismissal process for incompetent teachers to a four- to six-month period.

In real numbers, this would mean that a teacher in Houston would start at $62,000 and the best would earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $130,000. For content-rich college graduates, teaching will actually become a profession they can ligetimately consider as a career, without taking a vow of poverty.

In Miller's words... "With the amount they would be able to put aside in savings at these salaries, the aim would be to make America's best teachers of poor children millionaires over their careers. We need nothing less if we're to change the way this essential career is viewed by our brightest college graduates."

This is it folks - this is the start of an answer to our national education dilemma. In a nation that has the foremost system of higher education in the world, it is a sin that we should have a k-12 system that ranks last in the world.

This proposal would double our national spending on education from 7% to 14% of our annual budget, but would place the much-needed (and hereto much-lacking) priority on reform. Rather than making the stakes higher for teachers in place now, this proposal correctly targets the underlying problem of attracting the brightest scholars into a profession for reasons other than altruism.

**Many thanks to Casey Mull for letting me crash at his place for three nights and having books laying around his house that I find intelectually stimulating!