Fascinating experiment going on in a New York City charter school this upcoming school year, as profiled in the New York Times. The new school, which has enrolled 120 fifth graders in the inaugural class, will have some interesting characteristics:

- Average class size of 30 students, six more than the average class size in the city
- No assistant principals or deans at the entire school
- No substitute teachers or teaching aides
- Staff works longer hours than in average city schools
- Teachers can be fired at will
- Oh yeah, and that last little devilish detail...

The eight teachers in the building will each earn $125,000 per year!

Now ask yourself two questions:
1) Would you want to work at this school as a teacher?
2) Would you want to send your kid to this school as a parent?

For me, the answer is yes to both, but there are interesting issues with both questions. For the first question, it's true that the teachers at the school--a "dream team" that was recruited by the school's founder and principal after digging through 600 applications and visiting the classrooms of 30 some finalists--will be sacrificing a bit for their higher pay. But it's not just the money that will be rewarding; it's the chance to prove that teacher quality does matter--that not all teachers are interchangeable parts because some are simply much, much better than their peers.

As far as the second question, it's a gut-level decision for individual parents to make, to be sure. But if you give a parent the choice between a mediocre (or worse) teacher in a classroom with 24 kids and a proven, high-performing teacher with 30 kids, my hope is that they would take the latter situation without pause.

Only time will tell if this little experiment in NYC will prove the power of paying excellent teachers huge salaries (or perhaps, salaries commensurate with their social value), even if it means larger class sizes and more demanding job responsibilities. There's still a chance that a much larger scale laboratory will emerge in DC, but until then performance pay advocates will watch the new charter school (named "The Equity Project") in NYC with bated breath. It's doubtful that the small school will change too many minds, however. Even if it works, people already ideologically disposed against the idea of performance pay for teachers are likely to point to the school's diminutive size as a reason to discount any lessons learned--and if it doesn't work (i.e. if students who attend the school finish their time at the school with the same levels of achievement as their cross-town peers who applied for but didn't get into the school) you can be sure that the opposition will tout it as a definitive case study.