Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Memory Test

Anybody feel like helping me try to find an article?  I'm usually pretty good at this kind of thing, but I seem to have struck out on this one.

There was an opinion piece that ran in the NY Times (I think) about 5 years ago or so -- I think it was between 2003 and 2005 -- by, I believe, a former Clinton aide.  The op-ed proposed using federal dollars to dramatically increase (double?) teacher salaries in a certain set of high-poverty (urban?) schools.  The argument was that this would cost only a fraction of what the federal government currently spends on education and, at the same time, would do more to help close the achievement gap than what we're currently doing by attracting the best and brightest to teach in the neediest schools.

Does anybody else remember reading this?  Anybody who sends me a link to the article will receive two gold stars.

Update: The gold stars go to Aaron Pallas -- the article can be found here

As to my memory, I fared reasonably well: the article was written in 2005 by Matthew Miller, who worked for the OMB during the Clinton administration.  He mentions urban schools, but never specifically identifies which schools would receive the pay raises (he says "poor schools").  He proposes raising pay by 50% and doubling it for high-performing teachers and shortage subjects.  He estimates that such a program would cost $30 billion (so he must have x number of schools in mind) -- 7% of the federal education budget.

2 comments:

Aaron Pallas said...

I'm guessing http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/28/opinion/28miller.html

Corey Bunje Bower said...

winner, winner, chicken dinner!