BETTER PAY AND BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS. The Milwaukee Public Schools are trying to steer strong teachers to weak schools. Joanne Jacobs isn't optimistic.

Milwaukee Public Schools hope to develop incentives to improve teaching in low-performing schools, but the focus is on rewarding all teachers in a school instead of singling out exceptional teachers.

That sounds like the variant of the prisoners' dilemma labor economists call the 1/n problem, and it's an inducement for people to shirk. It's almost certainly the wrong approach in the most difficult schools.

There isn’t enough money in the world — certainly not in school district budgets — to get talented people to bang their heads against a brick wall every day.

There is, however, another concept in labor economics called the compensating differential. Owen Robinson of Boots and Sabers got it, four years ago.

The schools dominated by poverty are also generally the crappiest schools to work in. They are generally in bad neighborhoods where crime is an every day issue. Also, the kids generally have less support for education outside of school, so the kids are less enthusiastic about learning and are more likely to have behavioral issues. Did I put that gently enough? To sum it up, it sucks to work in most of these schools.

Not surprisingly, teachers who discover better pay and better working conditions elsewhere, go elsewhere. But neither the Journal-Sentinel reporter, nor the Milwaukee Public Schools, get it.

Most business leaders put the most capable employees in the most demanding situations.

True, up to a point. I call it punishing people for being cooperative, and I sometimes suspect that it's a thinly disguised theft of personal time by less responsible employees that's enabled by management. But in the private sector, there's also a labor market, and a worker who details all the extra time and then has a raise request rebuffed, or is passed over for a promotion, is a worker soon to be circulating a resume.

The same dynamic is at work in the schools, but reporters and school administrators continue to be surprised by it.

But it's also a very tough request, because, in general, that isn't the way it works in education, where quality flows uphill, away from the lowest-performing schools and students. As teachers build up experience, seniority and, experts generally say, competence, they head for higher-performing kids, higher-performing schools and, frequently, the suburbs.

It is not from the benevolence of the teacher that we expect the three Rs, but from their regard to their own interest, right, Adam Smith?