By ELISSA GOOTMAN

So what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year?

An accomplished violist who infuses her music lessons with the neuroscience of why one needs to practice, and creatively worded instructions like, "Pass the melody gently, as if it were a bowl of Jell-O!"

A self-described “explorer” from Arizona who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools.

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By SAM DILLON

CHICAGO — As chief executive of the Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan closed more than a dozen of the city’s worst schools, reopening them with new principals and teachers. People who worked with him, and some who fought him, say those school turnarounds were worth the effort, but all aroused intense opposition.

"It's always painful," said David Pickens, who was Mr. Duncan's top lieutenant in the school makeover efforts here. "It’s like a root canal every year."

Now Mr. Duncan, President Obama’s education secretary, wants to take school turnaround efforts nationwide on a scale never tried before. In speeches and interviews, he said he would press local authorities to close thousands of the country’s worst schools, the dropout factories where only a tiny fraction of students are reading at grade level, and reopen them with new staff members.

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By Mitchell Landsberg

Reporting from Oakland -- Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: "We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply."

That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hardscrabble flats of Oakland sometimes seem like creations of television's "Colbert Report." They mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded "self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort," to quote the school's website.

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By Mitchell Landsberg

Sometimes in the evening, long after her last class of the day, Patricia Medina has an uncommon urge. She wants to go back to school.

"I want to come at night and just, like, make something," said Patricia, a sophomore at University High School in West Los Angeles.

What could reduce an otherwise bright, engaging student to dreams of breaking and entering? In Patricia's case, it's the lure of engineering -- the chance to build a robot or design a bridge, to create something that bears no resemblance to the typical high school assignment.

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By FERMIN LEAL AND SCOTT MARTINDALE, The Orange County Register

Orange County's best public high schools outperform their peers across the state in almost every measurable testing category, promote rigorous academics and prepare students for college and careers.

So say nearly three dozen performance measures culled from massive state databases about 64 local comprehensive high schools.

The Orange County Register's education team pored over these measures to calculate its 2009 Best Public School rankings. The best schools are honored with gold, silver and bronze medals.

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