Paying teachers what they're worth.(Scan)( School at Columbia)

While New York City public schools face an epic shortage of good teachers, many private schools in the Big Apple have no trouble attracting candidates. The School at Columbia, for instance, received 1,700 applications for 39 teaching positions in its first year of operation.

The school, which opened in the fall of 2002 to 100 students from kindergarten to fourth grade, is operated by Columbia University. By 2006, classes will extend through eighth grade and enrollment will grow to 650. Almost no student pays the full $22,000 tuition. Columbia foots at least half the fee for children of faculty, and about 80 percent for students from the surrounding low-income community.

Unlike public schools, the School at Columbia does not offer tenure; there is no union; there is no guaranteed salary increase each year; how much teachers make depends on their performance, not their seniority; teachers are expected to come in early, stay late, and show up on weekends to do their job well; and there are no guaranteed breaks during the day.

Those do-what-it-takes-to-succeed expectations are standard in most of white-collar America today. Yet it's not uncommon for unions representing public school teachers to expend more effort protecting a guaranteed number and duration of cigarette breaks than on passing children to the next grade.

Columbia fourth-grade teacher Michael Seal has less disposable income than he had teaching in Hartford, yet says he does "not miss the union at all." He arrives around 7 a.m. each day and stays until around 6 p.m. "You should be judged based on your performance, not on a certain number of years in," says Seal. "I like the fact that if I do an outstanding job I'll be compensated for that."

Arana Shapiro, who taught first grade for four years in Inglewood, ...