More Apples for the Very Best Teachers
School districts create plans to pay for performance
Before she took her current job, Virginia Harper sold law books. The more law books she sold, the bigger her bonus-and at the end of the year, the company would throw in a set of fine Irish Waterford crystal, too. Harper, who likes Waterford crystal, sold a lot of books. Then, six years ago, she left sales to teach reading at South Fort Myers High School. Things were different there: Your salary was your salary-no matter how many books you taught.
Now, however, the Florida Legislature has put $147.5 million into making book-teaching a little more like book-selling. This year, if Virginia Harper does a better job than 75 percent of her colleagues, she could get a bonus of up to $2,000. It's not Waterford crystal, but state legislators hope their new program called STAR (Special Teachers Are Rewarded) will do the same trick: make teachers perform better.
Florida is not alone. Texas and the Denver school district also launched "pay for performance" programs this school year. Arizona, Minnesota, and North Carolina have incentive programs in place, and at least nine governors of other states have voiced interest. The federal government is lending a hand, too. The Teacher Incentive Fund, conceived by President Bush and approved by Congress last December, will award $95 million to states and school districts that want to create incentive pay programs. "If you want good teachers and you want to keep good teachers," explains Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, "it's insane not to pay them more than you pay bad teachers."
Buckled. Pay for teacher performance is not a new idea-and its history has been checkered. Programs tried in Tennessee, California, and elsewhere all eventually buckled when budget crises dried up funding and complaints about unfairness piled up. But in the past few years, educators have learned from the failures, creating innovative new programs that seem to blow away the objections of the past. Denver, for instance, has designed a flexible finance system to reward all teachers who meet their improvement goals-not just an arbitrary percentage. And instead of using peer evaluations or a single test score, teachers work with the school staff to craft individualized ways to measure each teacher's performance.
The result: Students and teachers appear to be learning more, and interest has swelled, most notably in Florida and Texas, where a pilot program became a $100 million statewide effort this year.
But whether the new plans will incorporate the new lessons is not clear. Both Florida and Texas, for instance, want districts to consult standardized test scores when they dole out performance pay. Yet, says Texas State Rep. Mark Strama, when he asked the Texas Education Agency whether the state's test provides a good measure of the "value added" by a teacher, "the answer from TEA was unequivocally it does not." He sat in on talks about the plan, but he is not happy with the outcome. Both plans also set aside a fixed sum of money, making it difficult for all teachers who meet their objectives to get rewarded. In Florida, only the top 25 percent of teachers will receive rewards.
Another concern is overall compensation. Teachers in both Florida and Texas already receive salaries more than $5,000 below the national average, according to National Education Association statistics. "If we were on a level playing field with everyone else, then we could play with money like this," says Michelle Dennard, president of Florida's Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association and a teacher. "But until Florida does what it needs to do with teacher salaries, it's an insult."
Other critics say the money would have been better spent on resources like mentoring and training. The Denver plan builds in those supports, but it's not clear whether Florida and Texas districts will follow. Right now, some Florida districts are considering not applying for the money at all.
If Virginia Harper's district chooses to opt out, she would understand. "I still think it's a good idea but almost impossible to implement," she says. "I don't walk into my room and look at my students with a dollar sign on their faces-'bonus pay, bonus pay.'"
This story appears in the September 18, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.