How did the business model term, “pay for performance,” morph into the preferred way to assess teachers–by the number of student’s proficient on a test?

The issue has risen in an effort to turn around low-performing schools.

In 1992 the California state legislature set rules to allow charter schools, financed with the same money that would otherwise go to a traditional public school, often perceived as playing on the monetary issue.

Over time, according to statistics from state exams that public-financed charter school students must take, elementary charter school performance is “neither better nor worse” than traditional public schools.

Pay, however,  is often an issue.  See “As More Charter Schools Unionize, Educators Debate the Effect,” by Sam Dillon, The New York Times, July 27, 2009.

So, what next?

Advocated by the Department of Education’s Race to the Top plan to close the achievement gap in low-performing schools, one strongly advised mechanism to improve student achievement is “performance pay.”

Somehow, based on their students’ scores on one test and parent feedback, teachers will find the offer of better pay an incentive to work harder.  While the model may provide an incentive to complete tasks in the office or factory in an efficient manner, thus improving production, that is not how a school is organized.

A successful school is one where children are supported by teachers who know the curriculum and the best strategies to teach.  The parents, staff, and administration animate students to learn and the buildings are safe.  Exams are one tool used to analyze where students are doing well and where they need another technique or tool to master the subject.  Such a school needs adequate funds, but “performance pay” is not the incentive.

In California for a few years before the state budget went haywire, “school-based pay” bonuses were the rage.  Successful schools, measured by the state’s Academic Performance Index (API), received a substantial amount of money to use at the school site.  Rumbles of discontent began to surface over which schools received awards and why, but the plan was dropped when funds dried up.

Some schools in some districts, Los Angeles Unified for one, have tried various plans, often called “merit pay.”  Teachers vote to waive tenure and the salary schedule negotiated by the local union for the possibility of making a larger salary if classroom instruction improves and their students do well on state exams.  Some plans have been dropped; none have become institutionalized yet.

Another plan is negotiated around “knowledge and skill-based” pay.  A district like Douglas County Schools in Colorado, set in a well-to-do area, has few problems with meeting benchmarks on state exams.  The plan addresses pay for extra duty, for professional development, for meeting goals on an evaluation plan.  The incentive pay relies on foundation support and grants.

On the other hand, the school where I worked in San Jose Unified School District with the goal of school improvement on the API, budgeted monies for time spent on professional development and leadership meetings after school hours, and set aside monies for substitutes to allow teachers to analyze test data and plan strategies to improve student learning.  Over time, student performance improved.

Here was a kind of “knowledge and skill-based” pay about which Robert Weil of American Federation of Teachers has remarked, “The best performance plans are standard operating procedure.”  See “Pay for Performance: What Are the Issues?” by Ellen R. Dalisio, Education World, 2006.

None of these models address this question:  how does performance pay help schools turn around when the sole burden on the teacher’s back is how well students do on a single test?

Here and Now in the Education World will look at those issues in the next post.