Ever since the Equity Project Charter School in Washington Heights announced that it would pay its teachers six-figure salaries to increase their motivation and promote student achievement, it has drawn media attention and academic interest.

The school, which opened in September, pays its teachers base salaries of $125,000 or more a year. “If you want talent you’ve got to pay for it,” said Zeke Vanderhoek, founder and principal, who spent months on a nationwide search for some of the country’s top educators. “If you believe, as I do, that compensating people is worth it, then you’ve got to do it.”

Average annual base salaries for New York City teachers (Source: National Center for Education Statistics)

Located in a one-time mansion at 549 Audubon Avenue in a largely low-income, Dominican neighborhood, the school pays teachers more than twice the national average, according to payscale.com. Teachers will also be able to earn bonuses of up to $25,000 next year, based on school-wide performance.

To pay top dollar, Vanderhoek, a 32-year-old Yale graduate, has economized elsewhere: the Equity Project has large classes of 30, and teachers take on more administrative duties. The New York City Education Department’s most recent report puts the city’s average class size at 25.

“In an ideal world, we would have smaller class sizes and great teachers,” argued Vanderhoek. “But there is a finite amount of dollars to go around and you’ve got to decide whether you will have two teachers for 30 kids and pay them half or pay one teacher double.”

However, Luis Huerta, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College who researches charter schools, disagrees with Vanderhoek’s strategy. “It’s a very rational and limited approach,” he argued. “It focuses on one indicator, squeezes everything you can out of it.”

Huerta adds that higher pay won’t compensate for the additional responsibilities teachers will shoulder.  At the Equity Project, teachers teach longer hours than the average city teacher: the school day runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an after school program 3 days a week.  They can be fired at will and have no retirement benefits. “Teachers do not want to be burdened with administrative duties,” Huerta said. “This is a counter-productive approach toward educational success.”

But Vanderhoek says with adequate support, teachers will not feel overworked. “When I taught 6th grade I taught four different subjects. Here, we make sure that every teacher is responsible for one subject across different grade levels,” he said. “We also try to build into teachers’ schedules time to do that extra administrative work.”

Huerta doubts the school’s experiment will succeed in the long run. “This is an experiment, a very, very costly one, one that is simply not sustainable,” he said. “It’s not realistic, especially when we know through research that you can get more bang for your buck if you motivate teachers through intrinsic rewards, such as support from the administration, from families, and from communities.”

In a novel approach to budgeting, the school allocates all public money to its higher salaries, and relies on grants, fundraising, and private donations for its facility, located on a quiet side street off 193rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.

Judith LeFevre, who teaches science, told the New York Times that the school was “an experiment of sorts, in which I’m one of the subjects.” Education policymakers nationwide will closely watch the school to see whether this Wall Street model of higher pay will yield educational results.

“So far so good,” was Vanderhoek’s assessment last week.  “It’s a startup operation and we’re going to go through growing pains.”

Outside the gates of the Equity Project Charter School, the scene is much like any other New York City school on a Monday morning.  Students enter in groups for their breakfast. “I think it’s great,” said one mother. “My kids love it, and as long as I’m not paying for the teachers out of my own pocket, then I don’t really see the problem.”