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Another key reform was made possible when federal funds and money from the Community Education Alliance paid for bonuses for teachers and principals who demonstrated excellence, as gauged by student test scores and other assessments. For teachers whose average wage was just under $36,000, those bonuses were a powerful incentive.Beyond these changes, Register wanted to rid the nine failing schools of subpar teachers. But tenure made it extremely difficult to fire them. So he turned to a state law that allowed superintendents to reassign teachers.
Identify your worst teachers, he told the principals at the nine schools. Then Register made an appeal to the principals at the suburban schools: Would each of them be willing to take on just one of those subpar teachers? He was confident, he said, that the suburban schools wouldn't suffer. The principals agreed to his plan.
In the end, 55 lackluster teachers went off to the suburban schools, while East Side and the other inner-city schools got new instructors in exchange, and hired still others. As Register predicted, none of the suburban schools suffered from taking on an underperforming teacher. Those reassigned teachers either improved at their new schools or, after poor evaluations, faced ongoing scrutiny from district officials. Many inferior teachers wound up resigning.
Over at East Side, the reforms kept coming. From her first year as a third-grade teacher, in 1998, Amanda McKinney discovered that some of her kids couldn't read at all or read very poorly. The challenge was meeting their very different needs. With money from the Benwood Foundation, East Side paid for retired teachers to meet with small groups of students and give them up to 90 minutes of additional reading instruction each day. This tutelage goes on until students finally catch up to grade level.
The school's consulting teacher also suggested a way to improve reading skills: Ask the kids to relate what they read to experiences in their own lives. "Anytime they can make connections, they hold on to information much longer," says Baker. The method is called "text to self" comprehension, and now all of East Side's teachers get trained in it. For the results she's produced, McKinney is one of the teachers who've received bonuses of $5,000 per year over three years.
The bottom line for East Side? "The students are more excited now," says Emily Baker. "They come to school ready to learn." To her, the best evidence is a simple thing: "They love to hold a new book in their hands."
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