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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Thursday, June 5, 2008
Teacher performance pay: Costly and complicated
Ron Budzig, retired MeadWestvaco executive, was the first to bring up the question that was on the minds of several business leaders as Percy Mack gave his response to a consultant’s report on the district:
What about pay-for-performance?
Mack ducked and bobbed for a minute before committee chairman Tom Breitenbach, who is CEO of Premier Health Partners at his day job, essentially ordered Mack to add an investigation of performance pay to the plan.
But do business leaders really know what school-based performance pay looks like and how different it is from the labor contract-free pay raise systems many of them use at their companies?
In education, performance pay is different and often costly. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea.
Several school district are experimenting with performance pay, including Toledo and Cincinnati in Ohio and Denver, which has gotten a lot of press for its effort.
But these plans don’t junk the salary scale systems that are common to schools under their labor contracts. Instead, they seek to alter those scales to change incentives for teachers.
The simplest plans just dole out extra money. Sometimes this means schoolwide bonuses when schools meet their goals. Or the money may be awarded by grade level. Or sometimes individual teachers can get bonuses for meeting individual goals.
But those are not the performance pay plans that are getting the most attention right now. The hot plans seek to re-engineer teacher pay scales.
Mostly, the new performance pay scales seek to provide teachers a career ladder, giving them opportunities advance their skills and take on new responsibilities in ways that will reap better pay. At the same time, teachers who don’t take any steps to advance their training or responsibility will find their pay growth dramatically slowed. This may create incentives for ineffective or apathetic teachers to change careers.
Here’s how this type of plan works.
The usual scale moves teachers up in pay each time they add experience, which can be as often as every year or every other year. In addition, teachers can add a pay premium for additional academic degrees or coursework.
The elevation up the scale is basically automatic. Earn the degrees or hit the experience milestones and you get more money.
Under the performance plan, teachers still get automatic pay raises for added experience and education. But there are also four levels on the teacher career ladder. The ladder looks like this:
Beginning teacher
Emerging teacher
Career teacher
Master teacher
In each ladder level, there are steps, but they are limited. A beginning teacher who gets a doctorate can get added pay and there might be, say, four experience steps. But a five-year teacher with a doctorate who never advances to “emerging teacher” will no longer get automatic step increases. This doesn’t quite freeze their pay but it slows pay growth to the point at which making a career of teaching could look much less attractive.
How do teachers move up the scale? It usually involves some degree of peer or administrator performance review. Usually, part of the master teacher’s job requires them to review or mentor less experienced teachers. It may also require teachers to achieve internal teacher training goals.
But here is what these performance programs don’t do. They don’t scrap teacher pay scales entirely and gives principals or administrators a free hand to reward and punish teachers financially as they see fit.
And performance pay plans generally cost extra. The basic bonus style plans are simpler, but you need extra money to dole out the bonuses. Re-engineering the pay scale requires cooperation in labor talks and generally unions don’t give things that work for them (like the existing salary scales) away for free. Districts have to make the new scales worth their while.
The bottom line is that performance pay is not a simple fix.
(Image credit: Education World)
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