Pay for Performance: Rewarding Teachers the Right Way

Last April the Center for Teaching Quality released a provocative report, authored by 18 of the nation’s best teachers on how to design a 'performance pay system that students deserve.' In journalistic lingo the report has been evergreen. After 6 months newspaper reporters continue to interview the TeacherSolutions team (see most recent US News and World Report article) to learn how teachers should be paid more and differently and team members continue to be asked to speak before Congress as well as in varied public forums. In addition, a number of foundations, including the Joyce and Kauffman Foundations, have asked CTQ to replicate its efforts (in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland as well as Kansas) to elevate the policy voices of an independent group of highly accomplished teachers on this critical issue of performance pay.

Now the Center for American Progress has released an excellent report on teacher performance pay — mirroring many of the ideas found in the TeacherSolutions playbook. The well-written CAP report, penned by former teacher union and teaching assessment guru, Joan Baratz-Snowden, homes in on several key points:

• Focus on student learning, but don’t solely rely on test scores and value-added methods to identify expert teachers,
• Build new assessment tools, better tests, and an analytic infrastructure so teachers and administrators can develop and use more powerful evidence of how and why students are learning, and
• Ensure that teachers help create the plans and that there are no quotas on who can achieve and be rewarded.

The recent CAP report is a must read. However, the TeacherSolutions framework— designed by outstanding teachers (state and national teachers of the year, Milken winners, NBCTs, Carnegie scholars, etc.) — also highlighted several key issues often neglected by others. For example, schools must alter their schedules so teachers have more time to analyze data, review each other’s practices (and evidence), and spread their expertise. In addition, while the bulk of rewards should focus on student learning, teachers should be compensated significantly for a number of important teacher leadership roles — serving as a new breed of teacher educators and developing entrepreneurial community programs that serve students and families outside their four classroom walls. Highly accomplished teachers make a very strong case that a transformed pay system needs to place much more of premium on serving students and families than just raising a standardized test score a percentile point or two.

Too many performance pay plans do not offer meaningful rewards to teachers who help students learn more; develop relevant knowledge and skills; teach in a variety of high need subjects, schools, and assignments; and lead school reforms in their communities as well as across the nation (i.e., the four pillars of the TeacherSolutions framework). The Denver plan is getting close, where teachers will eventually be able to earn 40 percent of their base pay with performance rewards. The TeacherSolutions model calls for a menu of performance and leadership incentives that can offer teachers a chance to double their salary — and in doing so aggressively drive a comprehensive teacher development system. Perhaps teaching will be the profession that students deserve when the highest paid anybody in a school district is a practicing teacher. Then the system will be rewarding what matters most.

Comments

[Leonard H. Beck]

Dr. Berry, thank you for Performance-Pay, and for 'knowing what motivates Teachers'.

Please, please consider
www.prisonpage.net
for dealing with what demoralizes Teachers --- defiant truancy, bullying, exhibitionism.

Len

[kpli]

very interesting post here, thanks