Rewarding teachers without promoting them

Sometime in the past year (recent enough to remember the gist, too long to remember the source) I read an article about how in the regular business world promoting your best employees to new positions was detrimental to a company.  Your best employees have established their skill at the old “lower” job, which might not share any skills with the new ”higher” job, and so success in the old job didn’t predict it in the new job.  Better to keep them in the old job where they are outstanding, and find someone with proven skill for the “higher” job.  But the trick is to figure out how to reward and recognize the employee, and to encourage their professional growth without promoting them.

                From Biklen’s article “School Work,” it seems like this is where schoolteachers find themselves, but “the company” hasn’t figured out how to reward and recognize and grow teachers while keeping them in the classroom.  There’s some irony in schoolteachers chasing or envying the idea of promotion from other professions, when it is an idea which doesn’t necessarily serve those professions well.    

                When I try to think of how to reward and recognize teachers while keeping them in the classroom, I don’t have many ideas beside salary.  In a business, you could throw the thornier clients or harder problems to an skilled employee, which would bestow prestige, but I can’t imagine that a teacher would want the prestige of being given all of the challenging students.  The best teachers could be asked to coach other teachers, or their lesson plans could be used in other classrooms, but the article also makes it clear how important autonomy is to all the teachers.  It’s a hard problem.  When teachers do figure it out, maybe they can teach it to the business world.