Karen, you raise numerous important points.
One, it is important to distinguish between excellence and longevity. The two are correlated, but not perfectly correlated.
Two, it is true that moving to a less challenging assignment can serve as an incentive to keep talented teachers in the profession. However, I worry that the incentive to move to a less challenging teaching assignment contributes to a drain of talented teachers from high needs schools and results in a less than equitable distribution of teachers.
Your suggestion to provide effective mentoring and administrative leadership mitigates my worries, for the reasons you stated and also because teachers, like most people, are risk averse. Risk aversion means that high-needs schools do not have to provide an environment that is totally equivalent to the environment found in plum teaching. Rather, the environment in high needs schools have to be roughly equivalent to the environment found in plum teaching assignments. Of course, policy makers should strive to provide every student with a top notch learning environment.
