Exploring new pay plans for teachers, principals
The vice president of the California Teachers Association said last week that he wouldn’t oppose alternative pay plans for teachers, under two conditions: They must be negotiated locally, and they must not tie teacher raises to results on California’s annual, high-stakes standardized tests.
Dean Vogel was a panelist on a forum on pay for performance sponsored by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. The other panelists, who included a high school principal, a superintendent, an executive at a Silicon Valley corporation and a leader at a philanthropic organization who has studied the issue extensively, agreed it was time to pursue new ways to reward teacher excellence and leadership.
Panelists at the Silicon Valley Education Foundation forum, from left: Jeff Camp, Thomas Erzin, Marc Liebman, Jim Russell, Dean Vogel
“I’m amazed at the level of commitment teachers have, given a compensation system that doesn’t encourage it,” said Jim Russell, principal of Delmar High School in San Jose. The current pay system, with its “feeling of entitlement,” fosters complacency that takes away drive to do things differently, he said.
The California Teachers Association discouraged local chapters from signing agreements to participate in the Race to the Top competition, which required that teachers agree to use test data as a basis for evaluations and compensation. But Vogel said that was because the implications for teacher contracts were unclear from the state’s application.
Separate from that competition, the federal Department of Education is offering $600 million in grants this year through the Teacher Incentive Fund to create new evaluation and compensation systems for teachers and principals. Vogel implied that CTA leaders wouldn’t discourage local unions from joining their districts in pursuing the money.
No relationship of pay to achievement
Teachers are currently paid based on years of experience and academic degrees they received. It’s a simple and a predictable system, but it doesn’t distinguish between teachers who are excellent performers and those who aren’t, and there’s no direct correlation between years of teachers’ experience and degrees they hold and student performance.
Contrary to perceptions, the Obama administration isn’t requiring that test scores be the sole or primary factor in granting pay raises. Local districts would decide, as part of negotiations, how much weight to give test scores.
The panelists at the forum agreed with Vogel that there would be problems using the California Standards Tests as a basis for pay raises: Not all subjects and grades are tested; they are given in spring, but results aren’t back until the fall. Many high school students don’t’ take them seriously. They can be a poor gauge of progress of advanced students, and they’d be problematic in low-income schools with high mobility rates of students.
The panelists generally agreed there should be multiple measures of student progress, including lower stakes “formative assessments” that students would take over the course of a year.
Berryessa Union School District Superintendent Marc Leibman warned that creating a competitive pay system would break down collaboration among teachers that is vital to a successful school. But Thomas Ezrin, vice president for global compensation at the electronics component manufacturer Flextronics, said that the ability to collaborate is one of the measures that the company considers in deciding compensation. Other factors are leadership, commitment to continuous improvement and disciplined execution – traits and values that should be adapted to evaluating and paying teachers and principals, he said.
New system is doable
Russell expressed confidence that a fair compensation system, using a matrix of factors, could be created, while acknowledging that principals would be stretched to effectively evaluate all teachers every year. (That’s why many of the proposed evaluation systems include peer reviews by teachers as well.)
Vogel said the pressure for new pay systems is coming from Washington, and carries the assumption that if paid more, teachers would work harder – as if they aren’t working hard now. But others disagreed. Liebman said the purpose of a new pay system should to reward success and outstanding performance, as hard as that may be to measure. And Jeff Camp, the educational chair of the San Francisco based philanthropy Full Circle Fund, said that a differentiated pay plan should support a district’s educational strategy. Teachers by and large don’t go into the profession because of pay, but money incentives can work foster teacher retention, encourage teachers to teach subjects where they are in short supply and do additional work, like mentoring.
Camp, a member of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Advisory Committee on Education Excellence, acknowledged that it would take new money to switch to an alternative pay system. Taking away money that teachers currently get will never pass negotiations, and there’s obviously not new money now – at least not from the state.
That’s all the more reason to start the dialogue now, especially with the federal government waiting to hand out grants to get the process going.
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SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
I don’t say things like this very often, but there’s something really grating about an all-male panel discussing teacher pay, given the prevalence of women working in the profession.
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Forget about the immediate technical issues. What parent wants his child taught by a “low-performing” teacher. Sure those teachers exist already, but with a differential pay system based on teacher quality it will be a tough if not impossible political stand for school districts to pretend “low-performing” teachers don’t exist. A much better approach politically it to remove teachers who can’t teach a year’s worth of material in a year.
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I agree with RDT and want to add that too many people on this panel haven’t taught – and even fewer have taught at high-needs schools.
Competition for pay and pay incentives have not been shown to have remarkable positive effects – if anything, the effects are negative (Wall St. bonus season, anyone) – or deter collaboration. Collaboration needs to grow from grade levels to schools to districts, because ultimately we want all schools and teachers to be high-performing.
For the record, there is a strong correlation between inexperienced teachers and not very good results – experience does seem to count for something. Like in any job, I think too much experience without enough novelty leads to lowered performance.
All in all, I don’t want to hear one more word about alternative pay systems until California’s teachers know they will be employed next year. Eleven of the fifteen classroom teachers at my site – including four tenured, “permanent” teachers – will receive pink slips tomorrow. All eleven are high-performing teachers who are fully credentialed. Each has won at least one grant or award. We all teach at a high-needs school that is likely to end up short teachers next year because bumped teachers will not accept placements there. The teachers at my school would make out very well in any kind of “alternative compensation” system – if they were employed.
These gentlemen could better spend their time on the current funding crisis.
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Research is pretty clear on this issue that the factor that has the most significant impact on student achievement is effective teachers. As the Head of a charter school, and someone who also teaches middle school math, I can attest to the significant impact that effective teachers have on our students. As a K-8 school, we simply cannot afford to have teachers who do not impact student achievement in any significant way.
Our faculty is seriously looking at how we can build in financial incentives that rewards effective teaching and will also clearly identify those teachers who are just not that effective. Student test scores are one measure but it will be one data point among other measurements that we will use to reward those teachers that are high performing.
Too many schools are paying salaries to teachers who are not making a significant difference in student achievement. If we can bring in a higher caliber of teacher to our schools, it will be money well spent.
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High School English teacher – 18 years.
*Administrators KNOW which teachers are under performing. The problem is that they get taken to court and lose when they try to terminate a bad teacher.
*It’s the schools that need the money, not so much the teachers. Stipends never hurt.
*I’m on board with hazard pay for people who work in communities with higher crime statistics.
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Point well-taken, RDT. We hope to have another forum on this topic, and will ask teachers to join the panel — women in particular.
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Actually, Chris, research is most emphatically not clear on the most significant impact on student achievement. Diane Ravitch takes this notion to task in her recent book.
I strongly disagree with the notion that incentivized pay systems will bring better teachers into the profession – and I say this as someone who would make out like a bandit under such a system. Moreover, given the absolute dearth of evidence supporting the idea that the CSTs correlate with mastery of the state standards in all subject areas, I cannot imagine why a school would use these as a major component of such a pay system.
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