A plan unveiled today in Australia tackles a popular suggestion that's been thrown around in the US: putting "super teachers" (as the Aussies call them) in the worst schools, and compensating them with higher pay, a smaller class load, and the opportunity to mentor other teachers. This attempt to address the issue of teacher quality, long realized to be the number one determinant of student success, with realistic organizational reforms, sounds reasonable. It takes on numerous problems at once: staffing hard to staff schools, staffing hard to staff schools with good teachers, who typically escape to greener suburban pastures as soon as possible, shifting the compensation scale to reward excellence, and providing career advancement without moving quality educators from classrooms to administrative roles.
The one thing missing, at least from what I can find out, is how these "Highly Accomplished Teachers" will be determined and chosen. As we've seen with American forays into determining teacher excellence with government metrics (i.e., the Highly Qualified Teacher provisions of NCLB), it's difficult to measure something so amorphous as teacher quality with the tools available to a huge sprawling bureaucracy. Piloting of the measure will begin this fall.
