The Equity Project Charter School opened in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan five years ago, with a fairly simple concept: get rid of extra administrative positions and pay teachers a lot of money—a base salary of $125,000 plus benefits and potential bonuses after two years of teaching. (A New York City public school teacher with five years of experience, by comparison, makes between $64,009 and $75,796.) Even the principal would earn less than the teachers to ensure that the school would be able to rely only on public funding, other than the cost of the school facility and its technology system. The research group Mathematica Policy Research tracked the experiment at the middle school (fifth through eighth grade), and recently released an analysis, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, of the school’s effectiveness during its first four years. The result: students gradually achieved significantly higher levels of learning, with a major leap during their fourth year, equivalent to more than one and a half grade levels for math and nearly half a year for English. 
 
 The data was drawn from standardized testing, comparing students who were demographically and academically similar in surrounding neighborhood schools: TEP Students Additional Years of Learning in Math, English Language Arts, and Science Mathematica Policy Research Even though the Equity Project students fared better compared to their peers at surrounding schools, the Wall Street Journal notes that only 43% of the school’s eighth-graders passed state math exams in 2013. A pretty low number, though a considerable improvement compared with the 26% city-wide pass rate. Another big difference with the Equity Project, aside from the outsize salaries, is that the school looks for experienced teachers—the median teaching experience was 6 years—compared with charter schools that tend to recruit young teachers with less experience. But the Equity Project’s teachers are still relative newbies compared to surrounding public schools, which have a median teaching experience of 13 years. More From Quartz How Cable News Changes the Way Americans Vote 
 
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 This Backpack Designed for Poor Kids Does so Much More Than Carry Books The Equity Project’s inclusive strategy meant that teachers became a big part of the school and developing curricula—there was no assistant principal for the first two years, and teachers are very much a part of the student disciplinary process. For example, one form of punishment for a student who speaks disrespectfully to a teacher is for that student to spend the whole day with the teacher. It also means, though, that the teachers are working more than they might at another school. ||||| It's common to hear that teachers should be paid better — more like doctors and lawyers. In 2009, the Equity Project, a charter school in New York decided to try it: they would pay all their teachers $125,000 per year with the possibility of an additional bonus. 
 
 The typical teacher in New York with five years' experience makes between $64,000 and $76,000. The charter school, known as TEP, would pay much more. But in exchange, teachers, who are not unionized, would accept additional responsibilities, and the school would keep a close eye on their work. 
 
 Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a study from Mathematica Policy Research released in October. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere: 
 
 (Mathematica Policy Research) 
 
 The gains erased 78 percent of the achievement gap between Hispanic students and whites in the eighth grade. 
 
 The results are important in part because TEP also appears to have sidestepped some common concerns about charter schools. They didn't expel or suspend students out of school in the first four years. There is no evidence that the school encouraged problem students to leave or transfer on their own. And the students who attended were roughly as likely to be low-income, and to have had similar levels of academic achievement before they arrived. They could still differ in other ways — they could have more involved parents, who get them into the charter school lottery, for example — but TEP doesn't present some of the obvious factors that help explain other charter schools' success. 
 
 How TEP hired and trained teachers 
 
 The $125,000 number was eye-catching, but it was just the start of the school's approach to teaching. Teachers were also eligible for a bonus of between 7 to 12 percent of their salary. The teachers, who are not unionized, went through a rigorous selection process that included a daylong "audition" based on their teaching skills. The typical teacher already had six years of classroom experience before they were hired. 
 
 Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others' lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy. 
 
 The workload at TEP, where teachers also take on administrative duties and had an average of 31 students per class, is fairly heavy even with the extra pay. But the school also had more teacher turnover than usual. Nearly half of first-year teachers didn't return for their second year, either because they resigned or because they were not rehired. Teacher turnover has been found to have a slight effect on student achievement. 
 
 Overall, though, the results are promising. The researchers caution that this is just one study of a small school. It's not meant to prove that TEP's methods can work in every school nationally. But it appears to suggest that, at least, the approach worked at one school. ||||| That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein , the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.” 
 
 The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance. 
 
 Incentives are intuitively appealing: if a teacher could make real money, maybe more people would choose teaching over finance or engineering or law, expanding the labor pool. And no one wants incompetent teachers in the classroom. Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning. Even if competition could coax better performance, would it be enough? Consider a bar graph presented at a recent talk on teaching, displaying the number of Americans in different professions. The shortest bar, all the way on the right, represented architects: 180,000. Farther over, slightly higher, came psychologists (185,000) and then lawyers (952,000), followed by engineers (1.3 million) and waiters (1.8 million). On the left side of the graph, the top three: janitors, maids and household cleaners (3.3 million); secretaries (3.6 million); and, finally, teachers (3.7 million). Moreover, a coming swell of baby-boomer retirements is expected to force school systems to hire up to a million new teachers between now and 2014. Expanding the pool of potential teachers is clearly important, but in a profession as large as teaching, can financial incentives alone make an impact? 
 
 Lemov spent his early career putting his faith in market forces, building accountability systems meant to reward high-performing charter schools and force the lower-performing ones to either improve or go out of business. The incentives did shock some schools into recognizing their shortcomings. But most of them were like the one in Syracuse: they knew they had to change, but they didn’t know how. “There was an implementation gap,” Lemov told me. “Incentives by themselves were not going to be enough.” Lemov calls this the Edison Parable, after the for-profit company Edison Schools, which in the 1990s tried to create a group of accountable schools but ultimately failed to outperform even the troubled Cleveland public schools. 
 
 Lemov doesn’t reject incentives. In fact, at Uncommon Schools, the network of 16 charter schools in the Northeast that he helped found and continues to help run today, he takes performance into account when setting teacher pay. Yet he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own. And the stakes are too high: while student scores on national assessments across demographic groups have risen, the percentage of students at proficiency — just 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading — is still disturbingly low. And there is still a wide gap between black and white students in reading and math. The smarter path to boosting student performance, Lemov maintains, is to improve the quality of the teachers who are already teaching. 
 
 But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.” 
 
 When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once. 
 
 It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that? 
 
 Elizabeth Green is a Spencer fellow in education reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the editor of GothamSchools.org. This is her first article for the magazine.
– A charter school in Manhattan has been conducting an experiment of sorts: How do students perform if teachers are paid $125,000 a year? The results so far at the Equity Project Charter School look promising, the Atlantic reports. The fifth- through eighth-graders slowly saw test scores rise over the period studied. Four years of math at the school showed results comparable to 5.6 years at another school with demographically similar students, Vox reports. In science and English, they gained an approximately an additional half-year's worth of learning over other kids, the Wall Street Journal reports. What's more, the score gap between white and Hispanic eighth-graders shrank by 78%, Vox notes. It isn't just the high pay that sets the school apart, however. The 480-student school, called TEP, hired highly experienced teachers who underwent a day of teaching "auditions." They have extensive administrative duties in a school that cut some standard administrative positions, and they must hold up to tough scrutiny to get rehired. Turnover ended up being high across a four-year period, the Atlantic notes, with 20 out of 43 teachers working for only one year. (At city middle schools, about 27% of teachers don't do a second year.) Also worth noting: Only 43% of eighth-graders at the school passed state math tests last year—but that beats the 26% rate across New York City, the Journal notes. (Another possible education solution: 13th grade?)