How to make teachers' lives easier (sustainable version)

Improving student performance and improving teachers' lives are often mischaracterized as fundamentally at odds.  Programs that improve outcomes for kids often seem to lack scalability (there are only so many Ivy League grads) or sustainability (how many 11-hour days can you do before you burn out?).  But it doesn't have to be that way.  In Michael Goldstein's always incisive Starting an Ed School, he posts a letter from a former participant in his MATCH program, who left the fold to work at a private school in Brooklyn.*  He describes some of his experiences there:

". . . Teachers don’t have meal duties and as a department we meet just once a week Tuesday morning to make announcements, talk shop and share mathy things.

Our department chair is really awesome. He’ll observe me whenever I ask him to and is always down for a curriculum planning session. I write my lessons on legal pads and don’t need to share them with anyone.

The freedom and spirit at Saint Ann’s is an impressive but very overwhelming one. At least for now. Still, I’m really enjoying it all. Lunch is made by the cooks in our very good cafeteria and is free for faculty."

What struck me most from his note were the things his school is able to do for him to make teachers' lives easier:

• Teachers don't have meal duties;
• Department meetings are once a week; 
• Lunch is provided for the teachers free of charge

These all free teachers up to spend their time focused on teaching (which is why they signed up).  Moreover, the time they spend in the infrequent meetings is focused on their subject area, and they have a "department chair" (administrator? senior teacher?) actively involved in providing feedback and mentoring.

How hard would it be to implement some of these at low income schools?  Granted that teachers might not always want the school lunch, but on those days when you're racing just to get out of the house on time, having the option of a free lunch when you need it would be a great alternative to (a) being late; (b) skipping lunch; (c) spending time and money on whatever food is close by or (god forbid) (d) scrounging in  the unclaimed food cabinet in the teachers' lounge.  These are pretty scalable, and probably things that all the stakeholders in a school (or district) could agree on.  

The observation and feedback piece may be more difficult, because it presupposes that the school district has people available with both the talent and the inclination to provide that kind of mentoring, which may have its own scalability issues:  even assuming that the mentors were pulled from the ranks of skilled senior teachers (probably the best approach), the uneven distribution of teachers in most urban school districts could make it difficult to have the mentors on-hand.

But more changes along these lines would help.  Perhaps if we saw "making teachers' lives better" as synonymous with "making it easier to focus on teaching," we'd find more changes that everyone can agree on.

* despite the name, the Saint Ann School appears not to be a parochial school, from what I can tell