I'm a VP at Giant Corp. I'm a high school principal. Or, I'm the head of a school system. That sounds pretty good—and the money isn't shabby for those jobs in most cases either. Interestingly, many business people know that as an organization's standards go beyond merely "above average"—as it earns, in other words, the reputation of being an elite institution, where only the most talented people work together—the cost of employment begins to fall. People benefit so from being part of a known elite that they'll put off the chance to make more money in order to get other kinds of compensation—knowledge, pride, and the intangible value of having a notable, elite affiliation. Many elite institutions across American public life are driven by this dynamic. Why else do the most talented lawyers often work for the government at a fraction of what they can earn elsewhere? Why are our universities filled with so many of the best and brightest of our professionals, there to study and teach, making so much less than they could elsewhere? Why else do young doctors (and many not so young) spend years beyond medical school earning small salaries as they train for greater and greater specialization? And why should our K-12 schools not be in the same category? Once we come to believe that they can be, and that we know how to make it so, how can we possibly choose any alternative course? Perhaps out of fairness, one might say. We want our teacher corps to be a humane institution—not to be driven by the competitive fires that ignite even the judicial law clerks and top-drawer graduate students and university lecturers. It's true, we could be fairer to teachers, to make the profession a little less competitive, a little less demanding. In fact, that's precisely the situation we're in now, and we have discovered that by being fairer to the teachers—particularly to the less talented and less ambitious teachers—we ma...
