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Friday, June 3, 2011
Debate on merit-pay language in budget continues
Debate continued Thursday about whether a teacher merit-pay system should be part of Ohio’s two-year budget.
Senate Republicans re-moved the merit-pay language this week, but House Speaker William G. Batchelder, R-Medina, expects it will go back in.
The budget that passed the House includes wording for a teacher merit-pay system. Differences be-tween the two chambers’ versions would be hammered out in committee after the Senate votes on the budget next week.
State Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, said Senate Republicans are concerned about the merit-pay language being too similar to what already exists in Senate Bill 5, the collective bargaining measure that’s being challenged.
“We are very sensitive to the fact voters appear to be asking for an opportunity to weigh in on provisions of Senate Bill 5,” she said. “We don’t want to appear to be doing an end-run around a referendum.”
Lehner added, “At the same time, we believe teacher performance — both evaluations and performance pay — are important. We are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.”
Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Dayton, hopes merit-pay language ends up in the budget.
“We are supportive of the language that made it through the House process,” said Ryan, noting it would rate teachers according to four tiers — highly effective, effective, needs improvement and unsatisfactory. Key personnel decisions around tenure, placement and dismissal would be tied directly to the evaluation results, he said.
Ryan said currently in Ohio, seniority is the primary and often sole consideration in determining teacher layoffs. “That does not give school districts the flexibility they need to keep the best teams they possibly can in place,” he said.
But Ohio Federation of Teachers spokeswoman Lisa Zellner was glad to see the “performance pay” language removed in the Senate, where testimony continued on the issue Thursday before the Finance Committee.
“We advocated for all of that to come out of the budget because we had no idea how it was going to be implemented,” she said. “We support moving in that direction but we need to know that the method and models proven to work the best are those that will be used.”
David Romick, president of the Dayton Education Association, said the teachers’ union will be working closely with Dayton Public Schools officials on developing a new evaluation process by 2014, required under the federal Race to the Top program.
While the performance pay system is being debated at the state level, Ro- mick sees it as an issue that should be discussed at the local level and through the normal collective bargaining . “We are certainly willing to look at that …, but it has to be a conversation instead of a dictate from state government,” he said.
Dayton Public Schools Treasurer Stan Lucas said he supports the idea of “incentivized pay” because he believes “it gives people goals to work toward and it makes people want to perform.”
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