Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog: Eleven Troubled NYC Schools to Be 'Transformed'

Here's an article about the intensive interventions the NYC DOE is implementing at failing schools, including 30% pay hikes for master and turnaround teachers:

The city has announced that 11 schools the state considers to be persistently low achieving will get intensive interventions this fall. The schools all had graduation rates of less than 60 percent at the time they made the list. They enroll a combined total of nearly 12,000 students and include big schools such as Flushing High School, vocational schools like Automotive High in Brooklyn, and the smaller Bread & Roses Integrated Arts School in Manhattan.

The move marks a significant shift in strategy, following months of controversy about whether the city has been closing schools without giving them a chance to improve. The city is using federal school improvement grants worth about $2 million per school annually, for three years, to fund the transformations at schools it considers to have potential.

"We see capacity there to implement some pretty exciting reforms for the city," says Marc Sternberg, deputy chancellor for portfolio planning.

Though the city hasn't decided yet whether the schools will keep their principals, the schools will hire some new "master" and "turnaround" teachers who will be paid up to 30 percent more in exchange for taking on extra leadership responsibilities and helping other teachers. The Department of Education considers this a major step toward a pay-for-performance system for teachers. The union and the city agreed to a pilot program in which these two new titles will be filled by teachers who have demonstrated an ability to improve student test scores.

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