Better pay for new teachers.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)

Just as we in Denver successfully completed 10 months of tough negotiations with our teachers union, the issue of Education Next with Jacob Vigdor's article ("Scrap the Sacrosanct Salary Schedule," features, Fall 2008) dropped into my mailbox. After all the cross-table arguing, I found it a relief to read someone who got it. He offered the basic policy rationale for what we had spent the last 10 months working on.

Vigdor's case is as elegant as algebra: Raise entry pay. Decrease the size of salary increases teachers earn in the latter half of their careers. Change the way you manage the workforce. Start salaries high enough to attract the highest performers and reduce rewards for experience and for additional degrees and licenses, which have little demonstrable value on teacher effectiveness. How hard can it be?

Teacher leader Greg Ahrnsbrak, who helped organize Denver Teachers for Change, made an astute observation, "As a union, we've wanted to pay more teachers more money earlier in their career for as long as I can remember. We call it schedule compression. But we haven't learned the obvious. You can't front-load and back-load at the same time."

The trade-off is easier when, as Vigdor points out, you take defined benefit pensions into account. In the last 10 years of their ...