A June 4th article in the New York Times highlights a new charter school in New York City which is purposefully understaffed.  The philosophy behind The Equity Project is simple, "teacher quality is the most important factor in acheiving educational equity for low income students."

As Education stimulus funds stream to the states it will be important not to lose sight of the fundamentals.  While it is absolutely imperative that states build systems to measure student and school progress, perhaps the biggest hurdle facing struggling schools is finding and retaining high quality teachers. By isolating teacher quality from many of the other elements of school success, The Equity Project may very well demonstrate just how important teachers are.  And, hopefuly, it can provide further insight in to how states can better identify high quality teachers and provide additional incentive to reform a system which values tenure over performance -- in part because it doesn't know how to measure performance.