
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, December 22, 1994                   TAG: 9412220075
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A13   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JANET R. BEALES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PUT PRIVATE TEACHERS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

IN THE WASHINGTON, D.C., public schools, two of every five students who enter high school drop out before graduating. Among those who do make it, the average SAT score was more than 50 points below the national average. All for just $8,000 per student a year.

With performance like that, heads would roll in the private sector. But instead, the D.C. School Board - already the highest paid in the nation - just voted to give itself a pay raise.

Welcome to public education, where the incentive structure looks more like the topsy-turvy world of "Alice in Wonderland."

But public education doesn't have to be a black hole for accountability. A growing number of public and private schools are opening their classrooms to private-practice teachers: educators who provide instructional services to schools on a contract basis. By contracting for instructional services, schools can easily terminate relationships that fail to produce good results for students. In other words, private-practice teachers get rewarded only if students are learning.

Private-practice teachers offer everything from mathematics instruction to language arts to physical education. If the partnership is successful and students are learning, the contract will often be renewed, year after year.

Carey Stacy heads DiaLogos International in Raleigh, N.C., which provides foreign-language instruction. The small company taught seven different languages in the Wake County, N.C., public schools for more than a decade through a series of one-year contracts. Eventually, the district took over the foreign-language classes, hiring a number of DiaLogos teachers to set up and run the program in-house.

Stacy says her company stands behind its results. Schools like that. ``I provide them with a single point of contact. If the [DiaLogos] teacher is not working out, the schools come to me and get the problem solved,'' says Stacy. That kind of accountability is frequently missing in the public schools, where tenure and fulfillment of course requirements, more than the knack for teaching, determine teacher pay.

By purchasing instruction from a private-practice educator, school boards and principals can also draw upon specialists. Linda Cabral, principal at the public Miller Elementary School in Alameda, Calif., uses Project Seed, a company specializing in mathematics instruction, to supplement her school's math program. Project Seed employs mathematicians who use the Socratic method to teach mathematics to 4th, 5th and 6th-grade students.

``Math is usually an area that tends to be very intimidating to a lot of people. But they're [students] learning so much technical information in a way that is fun,'' Cabral says.

Cabral also says her regular teachers are picking up new techniques from the Project Seed teachers. Some teachers in the district use the Project Seed methodology to teach reading and social science. Cabral's school will continue to teach mathematics the Project Seed way even after the contract expires at the end of the year.

It's not just teachers who benefit from the kind of knowledge transfer that comes from such public-private partnerships. In addition to the math skills they are learning, students at Miller Elementary are also being exposed to a different kind of teacher - one who brings a different perspective to teaching.

Says Cabral, ``Students can learn from numerous sources .... It's critical that I bring in other human beings from other walks of life for students to learn from.'' Cabral uses a combination of funding from the district, the school and private sources to pay for the program.

Often, purchasing instruction, rather than putting another employee on the payroll, is more cost-effective for schools. One elementary-school principal in Northern California reduces class size by hiring additional certified teachers on an hourly basis under the school's Chapter 1 program for disadvantaged students. The cost of doing so, she says, is ``a lot cheaper than [employing] instructional aides.''

Greg Genal, founder of Ready Go Inc., a physical-education instruction company, says he determines a school's cost of running its own physical-education program, then prices his programs for less. Hourly rates for Ready Go typically range from $13 to $15 an hour. Ready Go, based in New Berlin, Wis., serves elementary-age students in more than 40 private schools. The schools using Ready Go pay only for the teachers' contact time with the students. Because the teachers are employees of Ready Go, the schools are not responsible for paying insurance and other benefits.

Private-practice teaching has the potential to provide high-quality education at a price schools can afford. Most important, the contract itself creates a direct line of accountability between the private-practice teacher, and the schools and students. It's not too much to ask a teacher to provide a good education to students. After all, that's what we pay them for.

Now all we need are private-practice school boards.

Janet R. Beales is a policy analyst with the Reason Foundation, based in Los Angeles.

by CNB