“We want to make great teachers rich,” said Jason Kamras, the district’s [Washington, DC] chief of human capital.

That’s from an article about merit pay in Sunday’s New York Times.

I don’t want to talk about merit pay which to me suffers from most of the same magical thinking flaws that high-stakes testing suffers from. Read Tom Sobol’s speech from 2003 for the best delineation of how NLCB gets it wrong, if you need a reminder, and make up your mind for yourself if most of the arguments he makes apply to merit pay as well. I think many of them do.

I want to talk about the idea that we want to make teachers rich.

We shouldn’t.

Economically, teaching should be a wonderfully middle-class career.

You should be able to buy a house in the district you teach in.

You should be able to afford to send your own children to college.

You should be able to teach for a career and then retire with a pension.

You should not feel like teaching is unsustainable economically.

I don’t think teachers should aspire to riches, and I worry that someone who is running the Human Resource department of a major urban district would think we should.

To me, that speaks to so much that is wrong in our country. Right now we have a disappearing middle-class… and those of us left in the middle class are made to feel that our grip on it is tenuous at best. I worry this creates a dichotomy where there is only “rich” and “poor” – and that is no good for our country. I make more money as a high school principal than I ever thought I would when I went into education…. and I make about 125% what a teacher at the top of the pay scale in Philly makes. That should be enough. What bothers me is that making a teacher’s salary (or even a principal’s salary) doesn’t feel secure. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for Jakob and Theo’s college… and I worry a lot that the pension and social security that should take care of me when I’m retired won’t be there. I worry that the house my wife and I bought could lose value – although Philly has held value much better than most places in the country. Dealing with those issues as a society would go a long way toward making teachers feel much more financially secure than a raise based on test scores ever could.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be economically secure. But thinking that we are going to somehow find the “best” teachers and make them rich is to set teachers off on a chase for something that makes the kids a mere means to an end that we shouldn’t be chasing in the first place.

Let’s make teachers feel secure economically. Let’s make sure there’s a middle class for them to belong to. Let’s make a life of service honorable and secure. But let’s not forget that service doesn’t have to — and probably shouldn’t — “make you rich.”

Many principals in the School District of Philadelphia worked at least some of this week. (I took Monday and Tuesday off.) One of my colleagues talked about how, after catching up on paperwork, cleaning her office and getting a lot of the immediate stuff off of her plate, she wasn’t sure what to do next. I threw out some ideas… write up a wish-list of where you want your school to be… revisit a process in the school that you don’t think works well… or even just catch up on the Ed Leadership magazines that gather dust in the office. Of course, I was making those suggestions while still feeling the weight of my "must-do" list.

And as I’ve been reflecting on that interaction for two reasons. The first thing I was thinking about was how, after what has been a very stressful last year or so in the School District, it is harder than it should be to actually step back, reflect and plan. So many principals – myself included too often – have been struggling to deal with the changes, the cuts, the mandates, such that when we find ourselves without an imminent deadline, we don’t always know what to do. I try to keep a list of stuff to do when I find myself not knowing what to work on next, but when you are always living in crisis, it can be really hard to get to that list. And all over this country, principals (and teachers) are living in the grind too much. And for me, I needed this week at work – as crazy as that sounds – just to feel good about entering 2012 ready and not in the middle of a crisis, even if I didn’t clear everything off of my to-do list – let alone my wish list.

But then, I started thinking about our students who struggle the most in our schools. Most teachers who don’t assign homework over Winter Break tell those students who are behind, "Use this time to catch up." I know I did that all the time. And a lot of kids do use Winter Break to catch up, but then they haven’t really gotten out of that crisis mode. It is easy to say, as a teacher, "Why didn’t you use the rest of the time to plan? To get ahead?" But when you have felt behind for so long, it can be hard to look forward and plan… and so patterns get repeated.

If we want schools to be healthier places, we have to look at the unhealthy patterns that exist and try to figure out how to undo them. I don’t like living in crisis-mode, so on a personal / administrative mode, I am going to make more of a concerted effort to figure out how not to. But I think I have to remember to be one school here. I want all of adults at SLA to think about that feeling of "Oh no, what’s next?" that we have all felt from time to time… and I want us to remember the paralysis we felt when we fell behind on narratives and then had to catch up… or when the grading load nearly broke us… and then I want us to think about how we can not just learn to mitigate those moments for ourselves, but for our kids as well.

[tap, tap, tap… is this on? Anyone still reading? Sorry I’ve been gone so long.]

This is an idea I’ve been kicking around… anyone who has been with me for my workshop on Where Does It Live: Building Systems and Structures Around What You Believe knows that I think schools need to do a better job of saying what they do and doing what they say. What follows is my attempt to distill a lot of that into an accessible question for parents and students to ask of their schools. It is, simply, this:

I believe than any parent should be able to walk into any school and ask any teacher, student, staff member, “What does teaching and learning look like here? What are the ways in which that is nurtured and developed for everyone in the school community?” and get a real, coherent answer that isn’t just lip-service.

Don’t we want families to ask those questions?

Don’t we want schools that can answer those questions meaningfully?

We can, as a society, hold in our heads that schools can answer those questions meaningfully and differently. And we can understand that any school that can meaningfully answer those questions probably has a better shot of being a school that truly matters than one that cannot.

We will only know what schools that matter look like when we work toward our answers to those questions and when we start sharing our answers.

So how would your school answer those questions?