ABSTRACT
Salaries for teachers and support staff are the largest component of the total State education budget. States have given various degrees of autonomy to schools to decide on the composition and mix of staffing and to select their teachers and support staff, and none has made the move to hire and fire at the local level. Staffing turbulence makes it extremely difficult to establish trust between the school and its parent communities. This trust and familiarity is a very important aspect of managing everyday discipline and welfare demands. Rustbelt school principals become quite obsessed with ensuring that students have teachers who are both keen and well equipped, intellectually and professionally, for the pedagogical challenges of working with their particular school mix. Many rustbelt principals suggest that some kind of incentive-based scheme, which inevitably categorises and stigmatises the neighbourhood and the school, is so far the best proposed solution on offer.
