Rafiq Kalam Id-Din\’s Top-Dollar TeachersEach year, 1.2 million kids drop out of U.S. high schools. Of the top 10 countries in the world, the U.S. ranks ninth in math and is not even ranked in science. By 2020, the U.S. will have 123 million high-skill jobs and fewer than 50 million people to fill them. Nevertheless, there are some hopeful signs. Today, Teach for America is our nation’s top college recruiter, yielding 46,000 applications for 4,000 slots.
As Cheryl Dorsey of Echoing Green said, “They are part of this tidal wave of youthful optimism and zeal that is dedicated to solving our nation’s education crisis.” From there, she introduced four young educators whose ideas have been yielding amazing results. One of the boldest ideas comes from Rafiq Kalam Id-Din, founder of Teaching Firms of America Community, who’s opening the first teaching firm in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. His idea is that law firms and financial institutions are sucking up all the best talent and that the way to improve the system is by making teaching a business that rewards the best and the brightest, just as other industries do. “Like the Cravath model did for the law firm in the 20th century, the teaching firm charter school model inspired by law firms will revolutionize the 21st,” he says.
Teachers at his charter school will be paid $150,000 to $300,000 a year. “We are not interested in replicating the billable hour or harsh impersonal working environments ordinarily associated with white-shoe law firms,” he says. “But we will put at the center of our enterprise, highly effective instructional practice, service to our students…With a great education, anything is possible.”