The new DCPS contract is interesting mostly because of the non-traditional way officials seemed to get the deal done. With school systems nationwide dealing with funding issues, I do think it has national implications.

Particularly interesting is the way philanthropic support was used to support teacher pay. Using private donations to support a greater public good is not new. Using them in this way reflects a new way of thinking.

As Riccards rightly notes, education advocates have been asking for federal funds to pay for teacher pay increases in the stalled edujobs bill, so it seems the controversy over the use of private philanthropic contributions is misguided. Sustainability issues notwithstanding, let’s see how this goes. Really good ideas can often be replicated and sustained with the advocacy of strong leaders and community support.

Meanhile, states and school systems would be wise to look at other ways to innovate and operate more efficiently without hurting student performance as public education funding becomes increasingly limited. Soliciting community financial support to help attract and retain the best classroom talent is one forward-thinking approach.

In Ohio last month, Gov. Ted Strickland asked KnowledgeWorks to recommend efficiencies and to find innovations in the way our K-12 schools operate. One important component of our plan is to seek greater support from those outside the education field to help teachers and students – without increasing tax obligations.

The rainy day that we look to plan for is upon us. Stimulus dollars will wane. Strapped voters aren’t passing school levies. Schools are shuttering in many communities. Teachers and administrators are being laid off. Yet, none of us can afford to allow student learning to suffer.

It’s time to appropriately respond to those who are demanding that we do education differently.

It’s not just funding that makes Washington, D.C.’s collective bargaining agreement for teachers an unlikely model for school districts that have little in common with D.C. While all communities share the goal of helping students in a way that meets their individual needs, and while most recognize that schools need better tools and conditions to accomplish this, communities use different approaches to meet this goal. And, most important, those differences must be accounted for in school policies and local laws.

Several years ago, for example, in one of the earlier signs of frustration with education in D.C., the city passed a law giving the schools chancellor complete authority for evaluating teachers. Similarly, after experiments with vouchers and charter schools didn’t yield the promised results, another D.C. law created mayoral control of the school system. And, of course, D.C. has a one-of-a-kind position as a city that also functions as both a state and the nation’s capital.

So, while it might be convenient to simply copy and paste D.C.’s contract language to use elsewhere, it wouldn’t work. And it’s not just convenience that makes some want to replicate this contract elsewhere. Those who want to define reform as simply changes that give management more authority are distorting the D.C. contract to serve their purposes. They pretend superintendents can just hire and fire their way to better schools, and they put out a smokescreen of misleading rhetoric so that casual observers won’t notice their “reforms” have little to do with enhancing teacher quality or taking the other steps that help kids succeed. Or, their focus is on providing management with additional tools, even though the tools really needed are those that help ensure day-to-day instruction is the best it can be.

Consider seniority, for example. D.C. law has allowed layoffs and RIFs regardless of seniority for years. That fact, in and of itself, has not significantly changed the D.C. schools for the better in the past decade. The seniority issue is a red herring. You wouldn’t go into a hospital and fire the most senior and experienced doctors or nurses, and we shouldn’t take that approach in our schools.

The schools chancellor in D.C. for years has had sole responsibility for teacher evaluations. IMPACT (the D.C. teacher evaluation system) was imposed, not negotiated. So, for more than a decade, the chancellor could have put in place any evaluation system, and yet the “blame the teacher” crowd likes to pretend that D.C.’s old contract was an obstacle to better teacher evaluations.

D.C.’s contract is what it is: a vehicle for better schools in D.C. and a voice for teachers on critical policies affecting their students. The contract is full of compromises based on what is good for students and fair to teachers. If it’s implemented smartly, the kids will be the winners.

While the details of the contract don’t constitute a national model, there are some features of the negotiating process that might serve as lessons for those in other districts.

Districts considering pay proposals that are top-down, simplistic and divisive can look to D.C. to find a way out. The red-green compensation proposal that was the starting point in the D.C. negotiations is gone. In its place is a system that gives all teachers the opportunity to participate in the individual performance pay plan—which is on top of the existing pay plan. And whereas these performance pay plans haven’t worked elsewhere, we were willing to negotiate such a plan and give it a try. Many times, they haven't increased student achievement because they are designed only to reward an effect, not to share and replicate how the effect was accomplished. And tenure, which was always supposed to be about due process and not about a lifetime job guarantee, remains intact—despite some claims to the contrary. The contract also includes many other checks and balances. There are new measures to ensure that employment decisions are made based upon the rubrics negotiated in the contract, and not for reasons that are capricious or based on issues of age or personality. This is a huge shift away from the more arbitrary power principals have had in D.C.

School officials, policymakers and teachers across the country can learn from D.C. They should take heart in the collaboration and persistence that resulted in a better contract for D.C.’s kids. And, just as important, they should resist the pressure to copy and paste detailed language in the D.C. contract, which was negotiated specifically for this city’s students and circumstances.

Johnny rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard.

The new DC contract is both fantastic and Faustian. Ms. Rhee and Ms. Weingarten have earned their spots in ed reform history: Ms. Rhee for bringing home the first big time big city performance-based pay program; Ms. Weingarten for bringing home the bacon and for crossing the “pay for play” picket line.

At a time when public employees all over the country are losing their jobs and taking pay cuts, Ms. Weingarten wrangled a raise for her teachers that union leaders couldn’t get even in the best of times. Ms. Rhee also drove a hard bargain. A negotiation that at times looked like the typical Labor versus Management schoolyard smackdown ended up more like The World Series of Poker—with everyone going “all in”.

No matter how this turns out, serious ground has been broken here. But other things may end up broken, too. And that’s where Goethe and Charlie Daniels meet Robert Johnson at the Crossroads.

As in all Faustian bargains there are a million ways to lose one's soul and only one way to beat the devil at his own game. Here’s what the win might look like:

1. Immediate and extraordinary gains in student performance.

2. A contract renewal on similar terms, probably with an additional teacher pay raise, and a second infusion of philanthropy.

3. Continued improvements in student performance.

4. An influx of high-quality talent attracted by the extraordinary pay potential and the chance to be part of education history.

5. ???

And that’s the kicker. How can this program be sustained beyond one or two rounds? Probably only through congressional appropriation. If the new contract really works, DC will be a miracle we can’t afford to fund—or to fail. A 10-year appropriation from congress to support super-high salaries is the only way I can see this playing out in the long run. DC would end up with salary and per-pupil expenditures twice as high as the next highest district in the country. But that could be rationalized for our nation’s capital.

The devil, of course, is always in the details, and just about everyone who posted this week raised a salient issue or two in this regard. As Mr. Neill points out, performance-based pay isn’t exactly a slam dunk remedy for improving performance. My reading of the business literature on this subject tells me that performance-based pay works best when organizations are looking to increase performance of simple tasks. Complex tasks requiring hybrid skill sets and the ability to handle unpredictable interactions, don’t respond as well or as consistently to financial incentives. On the other hand, the effects of performance-based pay incentives as high as those in the DC contract have never been studied in education. Who knows what could happen?

What we do know is this: If gains are not immediate, or if gains cannot be disaggregated to show a direct relationship to the performance-based pay increase, DC has a problem, as do all promoters of performance-based pay in schools. How could anyone justify another philanthropic infusion to fund something that can’t be shown to have worked? If the program is dismantled or cut back, teachers will find themselves working for less money, and that’s likely to be a morale killer as well as a discouragement to the top talent DC has recruited in the last few years. In a sense, then, both Ms. Rhee and Ms. Weingarten have taken a huge risk here. Ms. Rhee risks her success to date, and possibly her continued tenure; Ms. Weingarten risks the rebellion of her members who are unlikely to be happy about pay cuts, even if those cuts merely restore salaries to pre-contract levels; and we all risk the loss of performance-based pay as a reputable lever of reform. That’s a lot to lay on the line, but that’s how these “deal with the devil” things work, right?

As it happens, I’ve been visiting in DC all week long. I watched Strasburg mow down the Pirates, devoured a Half Smoke from Ben’s Chili Bowl, and have consistently marveled at how different and wonderful the energy is here now than it was when I first visited in 1985. This is a fantastic city and folks everywhere seem to know it. Why shouldn’t they have a fantastic school system?

Almost everyone I’ve met this week, once they learn that I work in education, has asked me what I think of the contract. But I want to know what they think. Mostly, people are excited, energized, and hopeful. Some realize the nature of the risk. All have been shocked to discover, as I was, that the retroactive nature of the contract means that teachers who have already retired will receive large amounts of money for doing nothing. But, in general, I think everyone is hopelessly attracted to the story of a once-hopeless district cutting a dramatic deal in the hope of achieving sweeping success. Yes, that’s a lot of hope. But that’s mostly what I’ve found here.

Even though this should be about the kids, it’s really about the story. This “deal with the devil” theme is the stuff of art and legend. No one I’ve spoken to thinks this is a sure thing, or that it’s even the right thing. But the inherent drama in the scale of the risk, and the potential of the reward, is irresistible. Cautious optimism would seem to be the only logical position to take. But who can be logical in a situation like this? People here seem to be feeling very optimistic—and caution has surely been thrown to the wind.

This is a moment in ed reform history, an exciting, tense, and hopeful moment. It strikes me that the scope of this venture is broader and more dynamic than either of the two parties can manage. The contract itself is in charge now; the district and the teachers will be working frantically to keep up with it—and with the nation’s expectations of an unprecedented outcome.

The next few years in the DC schools will be amazing to watch. I predict that none of us has predicted the likely outcome. The situation is simply too volatile, too frenetic, and too chaotic. All hell’s broke loose in Georgetown and the devil deals the cards.

Yes, the new D.C. contract has the elements necessary to position Washington D.C. to achieve higher levels of student and teacher performance, for all the reasons listed by Weisberg, Klein and others. This is why we are supporting it with funds. But there seems to be much skepticism regarding whether the model can be similarly funded and sustained in other cities. We think it can, through an all-important route that hasn’t yet been discussed.

Here is how.

Beyond the obvious sources of potential funding for performance-based compensation and higher teacher salaries, like federal funding, tax levies (Denver levied a parcel tax in order to fund teacher bonuses) and philanthropic dollars, school district central offices can also free up substantial existing funds.

How? By simply becoming efficient organizations with lower overhead, school districts can redirect millions in existing funds toward modern day teacher compensation systems.

Over the last decade, the field has learned a lot more about the scope of inefficiency in school district central offices. Broad Residents (managers with M.B.A.s and experience identifying ways to streamline large organizations) and district staff in dozens of large school districts nationwide seeking to increase efficiency and productivity have freed up hundreds of millions of central office dollars. They’ve instituted standard financial controls, introduced zero-based budgeting, eliminated central office redundancies, replaced inefficiencies (like outdated human resource department pencil and paper processes) with technology, and renegotiated vendor contracts with terms that are favorable to districts, just to name a few.

By being honest about redundancy, Miami-Dade County Public Schools was able to shrink its central office by more than 25 percent and push those funds to the classroom (See Ed Week commentary “Without a Penny More” by Miami-Dade’s assistant chief budget officer, Ron Steiger: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/11/11/11steiger.h29.html). In Houston, the school district freed up $100 million by streamlining its central office.

Are millions in limited – and declining – taxpayer dollars, which are intended to educate young people, better spent fairly evaluating and rewarding our best teachers or on paying double what’s necessary to external vendors and redundant central office roles? This is the question taxpayers, superintendents and union leaders should be asking when they consider how to sustainably bring the D.C. model to their own city.

-- Gregory McGinity, senior director of policy, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation

After reading the very fine comments of Joel Klein and Daniel Weisberg and reflecting further on the contract, I want first to remember the extraordinary work of my late friend, Gaynor McCown, and her service with Lou Gerstner on the Teaching Commission now almost a decade ago.

The DC contract represents exactly what that Commission thought ought to be done to further more effective teaching. The proponents are right to celebrate this advance in policy and practice, and I think warmly of Gaynor - her smarts, her spirit, and her dedication - as I reflect on the manifestation of those ideas in the accomplishments of Michelle Rhee, the teachers, and their supporters who made this contract happen.

I do worry that fiscal conditions over the next several years may not make this formula applicable in other districts, and, further, that real professionalization will require that other contracts hew more closely to economic realities that do not offer up such generous automatic increases.

My other fear is that, as with other such efforts at differentiation in the past, we will see the pay increases but never see the reforms that somehow get dumped along the way.

So, there's truth in both sets of comments.

In Gaynor's spirit, however, I'll close with hope that this contract and others of its ilk will mark a true change for the better in teacher employment practice.

Over at Eduflack, Patrick Riccards pens a thoughtful entry on private dollars in public education as it relates to the DC teachers contract. Riccards argues that Chancellor Rhee is being held to a double standard by those who criticize the inclusion of philanthropic funds for DC educators. Supporters of the $23 billion in federal aid to the states, a one-time infusion, shouldn’t have a problem with the private support for Rhee’s new contract. First few grafs included here, visit his site for the rest:

For years now, we have heard how school districts simply don't have the necessary funds to operate as we expect. Just in recent weeks, we've had education advocates lobby for $23 billion in federal funding to help pay teacher salaries, asking for outside assistance to avoid major cuts to their payrolls and their educator forces. And while this $23 billion for edujobs has gotten stymied in Congress, it hasn't been because folks feel it is inappropriate for anyone other than the school district to pay for teacher salaries.

So why the double standard when it comes to the District of Columbia Public Schools and Chancellor Michelle Rhee's plans for financial incentives and pay raises for teachers who excel in the classroom? Over in today's Washington Post, Bill Turque offers up another strong piece on the evolution of teaching in our nation's capital, this time focusing on efforts by the DC Office of Campaign Finance to investigate charges that the philanthropic support behind the new teacher pay pact somehow violates the law.

The idea of not letting a crisis go to waste is certainly not new, but it has become prevalent and visible in the current crisis of educational funding. So, DC teachers have accepted a deal for significantly more money, hoping, I expect, they can do well enough to maintain their jobs. Well enough means, above all, boosting scores on standardized tests. Perhaps the new evaluation system, IMPACT, will provide meaningful and helpful evaluation for teachers, but how much that will matter when teachers know they face the chopping block for not pushing up the scores remains to be seen. The most likely outcome will be ever more intense focus on teaching to the tests, even though such actions will not prepare our nation’s youth for active participation in society, further education, or well-paid employment. I have little doubt that those backing this pointless and misguided (as Diane says) if not actively destructive operation will claim they are doing it “for the children,” despite the striking lack of evidence that paying teachers for their students test scores will provide benefits to children. In short, this is one more recent example of using the economic crisis to further deform education.

I'm not sure that this sort of forecasting is useful as we have very little idea how the DC contract is going to work and what other cities will do. On the former point, there needs to be some serious longitudinal monitoring and evaluation. Let's hope DCPS gives analysts access to the relevant data. As for copycat districts, the good news is that the reality of the DC contract proves that this isn't impossible. (Kant said "the actual proves the possible.") The bad news is that such a pricey precedent may give a bunch of timid supes and boards and greedy union locals an excuse for resisting this kind of change--on grounds that no private philanthropists have crossed THEIR palms with gold. The other question, of course, is whether DC can keep it up when the private money is gone.

The DC teachers contract has no lessons for other districts. At this time of budgetary constraint, no district could afford to pay big bonuses or salaries to the teachers who produce the highest test scores. Where would the district get the money to pay bonuses while handing out pink slips to hundreds or thousands of other teachers? Perhaps the Gates Foundation and a few other foundations with lots of money would like to underwrite similar plans for other districts, but it is hard to see the point.

After all, there is now a solid body of research demonstrating that teacher effects are unstable; that teachers whose students get high test scores one year may not produce the same results consistently year after year because students are not randomly assigned to classes. So teacher A may get a big bonus or salary one year, then fall to the middle of the pack the next year.

And to what purpose? To produce higher scores on standardized tests with multiple-choice questions in which students are not asked to demonstrate knowledge or understanding. To do this at the same time that state after state is manipulating the cut scores on state tests and dumbing them down (latest stories in past two days: Texas and New York).

This is all nonsensical. What a colossal waste of money. How little it has to do with improving education. We seem to be trapped in a moment of national stupidity, in which our so-called education leaders embrace one unproven strategy after another and foist it on educators, who know how pointless these ideas are but who are powerless to stop the misguided movement called "education reform."

One big lesson of the D.C. contract is that context matters. The tight budgetary environment played a big supporting role in the D.C. contract. Mike Antonucci is absolutely right to point out the big new dollars in the D.C. deal but, as Mike knows better than anyone, those kinds of big raises are hardly unusual in K-12 schooling. One reason these big dollars haven't delivered much reform (aside from management timidity), though, is that teachers and their unions felt entitled to steady, substantial raises. There was no expectation that teachers would have to sacrifice for extra dollars. One silver lining in the ongoing financial crunch, as Rhee has demonstrated, is that teachers and their unions are suddenly more amenable to some horse-trading.

It's no coincidence that a negotiation that stretched over nearly three years finally got done when districts across the land are dialing back raises and cutting jobs. As Tom O'Rourke, a veteran D.C. history teacher told the Post, "A lot of people say they like [the contract]. They like the money." Bill Rope, a third grade teacher at D.C.'s Phoebe Hearst Elementary, said, "If you look across the country and see what's going on ... this union better take the money and run." Judy Leak-Bowers, another D.C. third grade teacher, opined, "It is probably the best we are going to get."

Reform-minded legislators, superintendents, and school boards: be advised. Whether in the midst of contract negotiations or struggling to find the dollars to protect teachers from cuts in salary or positions, this is the opportunity to ask teachers to meet you halfway. There's never been a more opportune time to ask teachers to help rethink anachronistic policies governing evaluation, pay, or seniority, or an easier time for union leaders to make the case for compromise to their members. This is a win-win opportunity, if the parties seize it. Teachers, policymakers, and district leaders would do well to emulate Rhee and the WTU and not let this moment pass them by.

The notion of philanthropic support for improved performance should be your first clue. It’s not systemic, nor sustainable! We are constantly asked to run our school systems like private corporations. I have yet to speak with a CEO in Silicon Valley who understands or will put up with the constraints of our education code and our union labor contracts. Just this year we had to depend upon the good will of our own labor associations to save some of our best and brightest young teachers whose jobs were going to be cut due to lack of funds. SV companies just mandated pay reductions and everyone got to keep their jobs. This is a union issue with seniority as king.

Even if the D.C. model works, there is not enough money currently in California to make it work throughout this state. Let’s ask both labor and management to put their money (what little there is of it) where their mouths are and improve the image of our profession and reward the stellar people who devote their lifetime to this career called education. And that means paying people for what they are worth (as an example: great math and science teachers should be paid a market rate) and getting rid of teachers into whose classes you would not even put your own child.

For decades, contracts negotiated between DC Public Schools and the Washington Teachers Union resulted in significant pay raises for teachers with little return in the way of meaningful reform—the net effect being stagnant academic achievement in one of the lowest-performing districts nationwide. This new deal represents a sea change from that history, wiping out antiquated union protections that have long impeded student progress: seniority; lockstep pay; and tenure.

First, the agreement introduces rational employment policies already practiced in virtually every other profession. In the event of layoffs, teachers will be retained on the basis of their performance rather than simple seniority. The most talented teachers and those who work in shortage areas and the highest-need schools will be eligible for increased compensation. And annual performance evaluations will be based largely on whether or not teachers are helping their students make academic progress. These practices are eminently sensible, but in the field of education, their adoption is revolutionary.

No less significantly, the agreement makes it much easier to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom. Teachers rated ineffective who have opted into the performance pay system can be removed immediately if they are unable to find a mutual consent placement. And even teachers who do not opt into performance pay are subject to quick removal if they receive an ineffective or minimally effective rating for two consecutive years. Moreover, teachers cannot grieve their performance ratings, they can only grieve procedural violations. These provisions are absolutely ground-breaking—no other district enables such expeditious removal of teachers whose poor performance puts our children’s lives and futures at risk.

Given the powerful influence of teacher effectiveness on student achievement, these changes will have an immediate positive impact for DC students. In the long run, as the reforms take root and the broader public sees their value in improved outcomes, the DC agreement will hopefully become a national model, mobilizing support for long overdue reforms across the country.

Education philanthropists are putting a lot of money into D.C. but they're not going to be able to do that in more than one or two cities.

Furthermore, the national mood has swung against paying more to public-sector workers. So many private-sector workers are unemployed or working in lower-paid jobs or accepting furloughs and pay cuts or worried as hell that they'll never be able to retire. They are not going to support big pay-outs to teachers to buy what seems like a modest amount of change.

Of course, if the D.C. contract leads to better education outcomes, maybe I'm wrong and the foundations will pony up for more. But I don't think we'll see dramatic results in the short term.

Daniel Weisberg, vp of policy and general counsel at The New Teacher Project, submitted the following:

Ending the Widget Effect in DC Schools

Last year, we published a report called The Widget Effect, which documented how meaningless teacher evaluations encourage school systems to ignore differences in teacher effectiveness and treat teachers like interchangeable parts. This keeps them from recognizing and rewarding their best teachers, providing support that helps all teachers improve, or addressing poor performance. To counter this problem, we recommended that districts take several steps to make teacher effectiveness matter, most importantly by adopting better evaluation systems that produce credible information that can be used to drive decisions such as how teachers are hired, developed and paid.

Before we released the study, we previewed it with union leaders, superintendents, funders, even prominent education bloggers. We got mostly positive feedback, though some thought our recommendations were a little pie-in-the-sky (one big-city superintendent memorably called them “cute”).

Lots of water has gone under the bridge since we released the report last June, but the tentative agreement between DC Public Schools (DCPS) and the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) is a powerful sign that the widget effect can indeed be reversed in large urban districts. Some observers, however, have missed the revolutionary nature of this agreement—mostly, I think, because all the key pieces don’t appear within the four corners of the document. Here’s what makes it a real standout.

Fundamentally, this agreement would allow DCPS to treat its teachers as individual professionals, with their own qualities, successes and failures. The platform that allows all this to happen is DCPS’s new teacher evaluation system, IMPACT.

IMPACT doesn’t appear in the contract because, by law in DC, teacher evaluation can’t be negotiated. But that did not stop DCPS and its dynamite teacher effectiveness chief, Jason Kamras, from spending the better part of a year talking to teachers, conducting focus groups, and getting input on ideas and drafts, before IMPACT and its comprehensive performance standards were finalized. IMPACT correctly focuses on teacher effectiveness in promoting student achievement (50% of the rating of teachers in tested grades and subjects is based on their students’ academic growth), so, though the results from year one aren’t in yet, we should see real differentiation among teachers--great from good, good from fair and fair from poor.

In The Widget Effect, we found that districts not only weren’t evaluating teachers in any meaningful way, but they also weren’t basing key decisions about teachers on the only school-based factor that really matters to student outcomes, teacher effectiveness. The new DC contract, on the other hand, commits the district to making policy decisions based on the data that IMPACT is producing. This fundamental and essential reform is one no other district in the country has accomplished.

• Compensation: Though there is no new teacher compensation system in the contract, it commits the district, in consultation with WTU, to coming up with one by September. The potential here is for a compensation system that pays new teachers a middle class salary so they can move out of their parents’ basement once they begin their professional careers, and then, if they are effective, make beyond $100,000 a year in base salary and bonuses--not 20 years from now, but within only a few years. Effective teachers in high-need schools and shortage subjects will likely have even higher earning potential, which promises to staunch the flow of the strongest teachers to the lowest-need classrooms and schools (as the current system encourages them to do).

• Support: In addition, the contract ensures that teachers will not be thrown in the pool to sink or swim. The district will be required to provide mentoring and an array of specific supports to teachers to address individual areas of need.

• Dismissal: There will be real consequences for teachers who are not up to the extraordinarily difficult job of advancing student learning. Teachers in the lowest IMPACT rating category will face dismissal (if support doesn’t work), and the grievance system will test only whether the district lived up to its procedural obligations. That means that arbitrators will not substitute their judgments for those of educators about a teacher’s instructional performance.

• Hiring: Finally, like other professionals, DCPS teachers will get to choose where they work and principals, with input from their teachers, will get to choose who will be on their teams. Under this mutual consent hiring system, effective teachers whose jobs are eliminated will have a year to get hired elsewhere or a soft landing (in the form of early retirement or a $25,000 buy-out) if they can’t or don’t want to find another position. This avoids situations like the one in New York City, where excessed teachers can earn their full salary and benefits indefinitely, despite not having full-time positions in schools. In DC, mutual consent hiring is sustainable.

Much of the reporting on the DCPS-WTU deal has inevitably focused on the “who won?” angle, which is especially tempting given the outsized personalities of Michelle Rhee and Randi Weingarten. Hard for an old, hard-bitten labor negotiator to say, but they both should wind up winners, big time.

But assuming all that happens, this monumental deal answers some legitimate questions surrounding both leaders. Randi can justifiably say that she delivered on her lofty reform rhetoric. She should get major credit for crafting an agreement that maintains basic protections for teachers but allows for substantial innovation in compensation, staffing and due process. For Michelle, who has been accused of engaging in scorched-earth tactics, the agreement demonstrates that she can compromise where necessary to advance her goals (for example, about modifying tenure), and do good things for teachers while doing the right thing for kids.

But success for both should be measured largely in terms of what they do in the aftermath of the agreement. For Randi, I hope she does not take the position that the kinds of innovations she’s supporting in DC can’t be adopted elsewhere. Sure, there are unique factors in DC, most prominently the significant foundation funding that will pay for new compensation system, but the core concepts, like differential pay and mutual consent, will travel. Not every district will need dramatically higher pay in their particular markets, so the federal Teacher Incentive Fund could well substitute for foundation funding. And all districts, in advance of ESEA reauthorization this year or next, should be taking a very hard look at repurposing unproductive funding like the significant percentages virtually every district spends on undifferentiated professional development and for advanced degrees and education credits.

For Michelle, it’s now all about execution. Though she’s achieved the structural changes she needed in the contract, I hope she continues to engage with teachers and, yes, the WTU. In addition to the fact that their input will likely improve her plans, it will build some good faith she’ll need when the inevitable glitches in implementation occur.

But, in a word, congratulations!

I appreciate Mike's comment.

I was all set to write favorably about this move toward differentiated pay and why it's a great step in the journey to increased professionalization in teaching.

But then those pesky details Mike laid out got in my way! Drat.

I'm off to study the contract a bit more, read others' comments, and then perhaps come back a bit better informed.

As Gilda Radner's character, Emily Litella, used to say, "Never mind!"

The DC public school system has been a train wreck for many years, but the district hasn't lacked for attempts to remedy the situation. I remember the efforts of the DC Financial Control Board and its appointment of General Julius W. Becton to run the schools in 1996. The city has maximum class sizes of 25, boasts a thriving charter school network, instituted a short-lived private school voucher program, and still has mayoral control. It shouldn't surprise anyone to see an experiment with performance-based teacher pay and retention in DC.

As Bill Turque of the Washington Post reported, the teacher contract that expired in 2007 contained a host of measures designed to improve collaboration, mentoring and school turnarounds. So while the new contract has received an extraordinary amount of media exposure, little context has been provided about what preceded it.

The press showered most of its attention on the proposed voluntary performance pay program for teachers, but the contract offers almost no specifics, other than the promise that teachers in the program will rank "among the highest compensated educators in the nation." Private foundations will support the program financially, which forces us to ask whether those who are paying the piper will call the tune. The education establishment will worry about private entities with veto power over a public school policy. Education reformers will worry that the private entities will end up spending tens of millions of dollars on a performance pay program that won't deserve that designation.

The other newsworthy provision in the contract is the one that diminishes the importance of seniority when teaching staff is reduced. A teacher's evaluation, skills and qualifications, and contributions to the education program will be factored into the decision along with years in service.

This provision didn't come cheaply. Tenured teachers who are "excessed" will have a choice of early retirement if they qualify, an additional year on the payroll as "instructional support," or a $25,000 payout (with the freedom to reapply for hiring after three years).

The overwhelming vote in favor of the contract by DC teachers has little to do with these provisions and everything to do with the 21.6% pay increase over five years. Few reporters and pundits seem to have noticed that three of those five years have already passed - the term of the contract is 2007-12. More than half of that money is for work that has already been done. What's more, retroactive payments will be made to teachers who are no longer working in DC.

The financial incentives to enroll in the voluntary performance pay program will have to be significant, since brand-new teachers who don't enroll will receive a minimum salary of $51,539 in the 2011-12 school year - and those with 21+ years of experience will earn up to $106,540.

Will the new contract lead to improved performance of D.C. schools? Let's hope so. But its extraordinary cost makes it an unlikely model for other U.S. school districts.