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A Just Reward

Salary hikes, bonuses, pensions-does higher pay mean better teachers? Or is it about more than money?

Back in 2005, Liz Peterson (Baltimore '92), a reading teacher at Johnston Middle School in Houston, was trying to figure out what her district's new pay-forperformance proposal would mean for her paycheck - and her career. Good teachers in Houston, she'd been told, would be given a substantial bonus: up to $6,500 on top of their base pay. Peterson welcomed the news. She knew she was an effective teacher. All of her students were reading at or above grade level - a result, she believed, of the long hours she spent planning lessons, working with colleagues to help struggling students, and tutoring outside of class. Not every teacher at her school, however, shared that level of commitment. "I knew of other teachers who showed movies all day long," she says. "I would look out my window at 3:45 - or whatever the exact moment is when teachers can leave - and see them with their pocketbooks in the parking lot." In her view, any program that acknowledged there were differences in performance among teachers would be a step forward.

She remembers feeling a wave of unease, however, when she realized the bonus money was called "incentive pay." "That was offensive," Peterson says flatly. "As if you have to pay me extra money to get my kids to achieve." But she tried to stay focused on the big picture. "The message from the district was, 'Just keep doing what you are doing. If you are highly effective, you will get extra money,'" says Peterson. But when the Houston Chronicle obtained a list of teachers' names and incentive payments and published the information on its website, the district had a public relations nightmare on its hands. "Students were looking up their teachers' bonuses and then sniggering about it in the classroom," says Houston Federation of Teachers president Gayle Fallon. A few days later, the bonus checks were handed out to teachers without explanation. Peterson got only $500. It turned out that the Houston Independent School District determined bonuses using a formula that relied largely on students' raw math and English scores on the statewide TAKS exam. Since she wasn't a core subject teacher, Peterson wasn't eligible for the more substantial rewards. She wasn't the only one left out. So were kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers, whose students don't take annual tests. There was also no "growth" data for teachers who taught third grade English and math, fifth grade science, and 10th grade social studies and science, since children weren't tested in those subjects the year before. Instead, these teachers received small bonuses if their current students passed at the same rate as students had in the previous year - albeit a different group of kids.

"There was a lot of confusion and complaints," says Carla Stevens, the Houston district's assistant superintendent of research and accountability. "We quickly realized that we needed to communicate the plan better and provide more training and professional development around the concept."

"We wanted data we could look at and use to improve our work," Peterson says. Instead, the program bred mistrust and hurt feelings. "Even in schools like mine, where teachers really get along, I'd say it damaged the collegiality."

Momentum grows, but questions remain
Over the past five years, performancepay programs using a host of new models and measures were launched all over the country, including in Minnesota, New York City, Dallas, and Nashville. In Denver, taxpayers astonished the nation by voting for a $25 million property tax in order to fund additional pay for top teachers. Teach For America alumni - including D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee (Baltimore '92) and New York City principal Zeke Vanderhoek (N.Y. '98) - are at the forefront of closely watched new experiments in teacher compensation. Performance pay has also had strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill: In its 2010 budget, Congress has proposed boosting the Teacher Incentive Fund, which provides federal seed money for performancepay plans around the nation, from $97 million last year to $517 million. At a local level, formerly resistant union leaders are helping to create new compensation models, and many teachers are embracing the plans with enthusiasm.

Yet coming up with a plan that satisfies everyone is a formidable challenge. "There is an infinite number of ways we could design these programs," says Matthew G. Springer, director of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University. Solving that puzzle depends on how you answer some very sticky questions. First, how do you measure a teacher's effectiveness, and what metrics should you use? Standardized tests are a popular answer. But only 18 percent of teachers provide instruction in subjects with statewide tests, and most performancepay proponents now agree that student performance on a single assessment is an unreliable measure of teacher quality. Many performance-pay plans are now turning to the "value-added" approach, which uses a complex set of variables to create a statistical projection of how a student should progress and then compares it to that student's actual year-by-year progress. Yet unions and districts don't always agree on which variables should be considered.

And still more questions remain: Who has the power to evaluate? What's the reward structure - bonuses, salary increases, changes in base pay? How much money is at stake, and who gets it - individual teachers, teams of people, or schools? What about teachers like Peterson who undoubtedly contribute to their students' success in other classes? "Right now, there is just no evidence in the research one way or the other," Springer says. "We don't know which programs will work or which will work best."

But perhaps the biggest question is: Does money even matter? Despite the enthusiasm for solving the performance-pay puzzle, results from past and existing programs have been spotty. "Everyone expects that performance pay will work a miracle," says Rob Weill, deputy director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers. "The idea in back of many of these plans is that teachers have been sitting around on their haunches for years, but now you cut their checks differently and they'll work harder and the achievement gap will disappear. [But] the people who are serious about setting up these plans come to the realization that this is much larger than compensation reform. It's about looking at the whole system of teaching, looking at what works best and rewarding that." Last summer, The New Teacher Project authored "The Widget Effect" (see sidebar), a study that examined teacher-evaluation practices in 12 districts across the country, from the compact 4,450-student district in Jonesboro, Ark., to the sprawling 435,000-student system in Chicago. The researchers, who conducted interviews more than 16,000 educators, uncovered an uncomfortable fact: "Less than 1 percent of teachers receive unsatisfactory ratings, even in schools where students fail to meet basic academic standards, year after year." "We started off looking at why teachers never get fired, to try and separate fact from fiction," says TNTP president Timothy Daly (Baltimore '99). "But we ended up examining a much larger problem: The way we think about teachers is that they are interchangeable. The silent agreement in the profession was that the job of the teacher was to deliver instruction. And if you do that with anything better than incompetence, that's good enough."

Instead, we need teachers "whose core job it is to promote learning," Daly says. The profession of teaching must be recast with clear expectations, rigorous evaluation tied to student achievement, and the opportunity to acquire new skills and take on new responsibilities embedded in the job. Preliminary findings from a series of discussions with Teach For America alumni echo the study's conclusions that money alone is not enough. With the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Teach For America convened a 13-member alumni commission to guide a conversation on how to attract and retain the highestperforming teachers in the neediest classrooms. In addition, more than two dozen alumni from across the country participated in focus groups and interviews. (Teach For America plans to broaden these findings by conducting a survey this fall, and will publish a summary of alumni perspectives in early 2010.) Initial findings suggest that alumni believe retaining top performers requires rewarding them early in their careers with greater public recognition, more opportunities to impact instructional decisions and participate in district policymaking, and higher salaries. "There was a groundswell of feeling around the desire for more professionalism in teaching, about the desire to have ownership of decision-making around teaching," says commission member Stephanie Jones (Atlanta '01), a math specialist from Georgia. "There were also strong feelings for the kind of leadership in schools that will allow teachers to have their voices heard."

The evolution of teacher pay
There was a time when the single salary schedule - basing teachers' pay on their years of service and credentials - was a reform measure in its own right. In the 1920s, female elementary school teachers were paid substantially less than middle and high school teachers, who were mostly male. Basing salary on tenure and degrees was an effort to combat sexism and cronyism in schools and transform the "job" of teaching into a "profession." But critics complained that the single salary schedule condoned mediocrity by failing to recognize and reward good work. In 1983, the authors of the groundbreaking educational call-to-arms "A Nation At Risk" stated unequivocally that teachers' salaries needed to be "professionally competitive, market sensitive and performance-based." In 2004, the Teaching Commission, a bipartisan think tank, warned that "by precluding the possibility of performance-driven compensation, we fail to attract the more talented and motivated individuals to our schools." In response to each of these reports, dozens of small performance pay programs sprang up. Schools found them cumbersome, costly, and ineffective. Unions opposed them. Program after program launched with great fanfare, only to wither and die. Two historic developments refocused the nation's attention on performance pay. In the mid- to late- 1990s, research emerged that suggested that the quality of teaching was paramount to helping kids learn more. Reductions in class size, longer school days, or curriculum adjustments - long believed to be important reform measures - proved to have far less of a positive impact on student achievement than a highly effective teacher. "Studies showed the most effective teachers could provide three times the growth in student achievement compared with the least effective ones," says Vanderbilt's Springer. "If kids in disadvantaged schools, the ones who traditionally got the worst teachers, encountered the best teachers for five years in a row, our nation could close the achievement gap." By 2006, research indicated that school administrators had been paying a premium for the wrong things, and that degrees, certification, and years of service had little correlation to student outcomes.

Under pressure from No Child Left Behind to bolster performance, especially at struggling schools, principals were ready to embrace change. Yet administrators complained that while up to 80 percent of a school's operating budget might be spent on salaries, they had little ability to reward their best teachers with higher pay or to fire ineffective ones.

Two plans in action
Since then, districts have been hungry for a solution. Two of the most touted performance-pay models are ProComp in Denver and TAP, a framework being implemented in 225 schools across the country. In Denver, the board of education, superintendent of schools, and union debated a performance-pay program for years before entering a pilot in the 1999-2000 school year. "Early on, there was some insistence to use just large-scale tests to measure [teacher performance]," says Brad Jupp, a union representative who helped devise the plan and who now works as a special assistant to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, advising him on teacher-quality issues. "While there was a relevance to that, common sense begs that you look in another direction as well. What kind of impact are other individuals or small groups of teachers making? What about music teachers, AP Physics teachers, or grade-level or subject-area teams of teachers all working toward the same outcomes? There aren't large-scale assessments that capture all the broad and complicated jobs that teachers do." In an effort to broaden the reward system, ProComp, which gives veteran teachers the chance to opt in while automatically enrolling new teachers, looks at both inputs and outputs. Participants get a higher base salary ($42,000 compared to $37,000) and can increase their base pay by $1,500 for each advanced degree they earn over the course of their career. They can also earn a yearly bonus for working in a hard-to-staff school or subject. Jupp says about 60 percent of his or her pay increase is tied to improving student outcomes, meeting schoolwide objectives for achievement, and keeping their kids on pace with similar students from around the state. David Supess, chief operating officer of Denver Public Schools, says the goal of the program is to retain effective teachers by offering them more money earlier in their careers.

For her part, literacy coach Beth Douma (Houston '91), who has been teaching in Denver for 15 years, supports ProComp. She likes that the program rewards teachers for choosing to work in hard-to-staff schools like hers. As a result of the faculty's efforts to reach its campus-wide goal of creating lifelong readers, circulation at the school library tripled, individual reading scores went up, and the schools' test scores rose high enough to earn a distinction from the district. Douma and the other ProComp teachers at her school got two bonuses, one to reward individual growth and another for school-wide achievement. "If I was working in the private sector and I focused on a goal and achieved it, I would be rewarded," says Douma, who received a $2,345 bonus. "It's nice to have my efforts recognized."

More broadly, the results of the program, which cost $8.5 million last year and $31.5 million this year because of a jump in enrollment, are modest. Teacher retention is higher, though the struggling economy may be a factor there. Test scores are up, but only slightly.

For TAP, compensation is part of a suite of incentives to attract and retain high performers. Under TAP, teachers undergo frequent evaluations and have more opportunities for professional development. For example, the most effective teachers may become "mentors" and "masters" - specialists who are expected to visit other teachers' classrooms and help them improve their day-to-day classroom technique. For their extra assistance, mentors and masters are paid bonuses of $5,000 to $15,000. In TAP schools, which operate in 14 states and the District of Columbia, teachers are evaluated four to six times a year by specially trained staff who follow a detailed 19-point rubric. Test scores and school-wide achievement matter - and big gains can trigger more pay for all. The best teachers get between $2,500 and $8,000 on top of their base pay and a chance to take a leadership role in the school, eventually becoming mentors and masters themselves.

TAP is a favorite of teachers unions because of its focus on professional development and its more comprehensive reward system. But critics point out that the program is expensive, costing up to $400 a student annually. It also requires an enormous amount of energy and attention to keep running smoothly. Yet according to data collected by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, an offshoot of the Milken Foundation that runs TAP, the program is making a difference. Though independent and comprehensive research on TAP is hard to come by, NIET says many TAP schools are reporting higher rates of retention and that some schools are reversing the flow of teachers from low-performing schools to more affluent ones. In South Carolina, where average teacher turnover exceeds 30 percent, TAP schools retain more than 90 percent of their teachers. In a 2007 study conducted with NIET, researchers found that TAP schools - 88 percent of which are high-need - were more likely to make "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind than non-TAP schools in their state. Other studies have found that TAP elementary schools earned higher scores on standardized math tests, though middle and high schools using TAP scored lower than non-TAP schools. More thorough research is currently being conducted.

After a rocky start, Houston, too, has made changes to its program, offering more money and adopting a value-added model that looks at top-, middle-, and low-performing student achievement on two state tests. HISD's Carla Stevens says scores for state tests rose substantially over the past two years, and the number of schools with a 90 percent pass rate in all subjects jumped from 15 to 84. But the program still has room for improvement, says Natasha Kamrani (Houston '91), a member of the Houston school board. "The big issue now is how to reward all of those teachers who add great value but who aren't teaching subjects or grade levels that are tested," she says. "We've gotten a lot of criticism on the fairness of the plan because it doesn't take into account great music teaching or art teaching or debate teaching. Something I've been pushing with the board is having a pilot program that puts these questions with the teachers. Bring in the music teacher and say, 'What are the objectives you would measure in terms of outcomes for kids? How could you measure that, and what would good teaching look like?' Clearly it won't be perfect, but you have to start somewhere."

Reading teacher Liz Peterson appreciates the district's improvements - and the substantially larger bonus she got this year. But she says more should be done to help teachers understand how the rewards are calculated. If the criteria and data were more transparent, teachers could use the information to make instructional decisions to benefit students. At present, she says, "most of my colleagues see their bonus as a roll of the dice."

Innovation or common sense?
The most basic practices of America's private sector - paying for talent and results - are starting to gain momentum in the education sector, including in two high-profile new experiments driven by Teach For America alumni. As of this writing, negotiators for D.C. Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee are hammering out what promises to be one of the most ambitious and influential differentiated evaluation experiments. DCPS is expected to offer teachers the opportunity to earn significantly higher pay - up to $125,000 by their fifth year of teaching - in return for giving up tenure. Both base pay and bonuses will be based on an evaluation of a teacher's performance: roughly 50 percent on test scores, 40 percent on evaluations by a principal and master teacher, and the remainder will be tied to school-wide achievement and "commitment to the school community." Teachers who come up short will have a chance to get better. DCPS plans to offer a menu of supports, including instructional coaches, one-on-one mentoring, model lessons plans, and workshops. "Ultimately, though, the burden is on the teachers to improve their practice. It's a dramatic shift, but that's what being a professional is about," says Jason Kamras (D.C. Region '96), Rhee's director of human capital strategy. "We want to make sure that highly effective teachers at struggling schools get more money and get it more quickly. At the same time, we believe that chronically ineffective teachers should not be in a classroom full of children."

In September, the Equity Project, a New York City charter school led by founder Zeke Vanderhoek, welcomed its first class of 120 fifth graders. The starting salary for each of the school's eight teachers is $125,000, with a shot at a $25,000 bonus for meeting schoolwide goals. (Median pay for teachers in New York City is $53,000. For teachers with a master's degree and eight years of experience, it is $74,749.) To Vanderhoek, the money isn't about motivating teachers to perform better, but rather attracting a higher caliber of teacher altogether. "My goal here is to elevate the profession as a whole. I don't think paying a mediocre teacher more money will make them better. They'll just be a mediocre teacher with more money," he says.

Vanderhoek says his eight teachers have three mandates: to improve student achievement, to grow as teachers by interacting with other master teachers, and to take leadership roles in the school. Their performance will be gauged by student test scores; peer reports; and his evaluation of their preparedness, contributions as a team member, and other evidence of excellence and growth. Underperforming teachers may be fired at will.

So where does the money come from? For one, the school has slashed the number of non-faculty staff positions. TEP's teachers work longer hours, taking on additional duties as attendance coordinators and deans. And Vanderhoek himself is taking a big pay cut. New York City principals make an average of $133,000 a year. He'll earn just $90,000. With the exception of the school building, which is being paid for through grants and private funds, Vanderhoek says the school's operating budget is publicly funded. "The idea is to make this very transparent, sustainable, and highly replicable," he says. "I want to serve as a model for other schools who want to experiment with teacher pay." Another group of researchers and economists is looking at a decidedly less sexy aspect of teacher compensation - pensions. Most states force new teachers to wait between eight and 10 years in order to be "vested" in the lucrative teacher pension system. The long delay, says Michael Podgursky, economics professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, discourages the kind of young, talented - and highly mobile - workforce principals want.

"Most school districts say, 'Come and work for us, but we are not going to contribute anything to your retirement for a decade.' Young people get hammered," he says. Once teachers are in their 40s, their pensions are backloaded, so that even uninspired, burnt-out educators have good reason to stay in jobs for which they may no longer be suited. "The question that states - and taxpayers - have to ask themselves is whether they are getting the kind of workforce they want for their money," Podgursky says.

It's too soon to predict if these experiments will mean higher achievement for kids. While small independent studies suggest bonus pay reduces teacher turnover, it's unclear whether it's the good teachers who are staying on. And larger economic forces may soon slow the pace of innovation. Although the federal government is throwing its fiscal weight behind the experiments, cash-strapped states are looking to spend less, not more, on education. In Dallas, for instance, the federal grants that funded the pay-forperformance program have run out. State-supported bonuses have been slashed from $8,000 last year to $3,200 this year.

Against this backdrop, Ryan Hill (N.Y. '99), who runs three KIPP schools in Newark, N.J., says he'll tread carefully. His fast growing network has depended on young, mission-driven staffers, but turnover is high. Better pay - he's thinking up to $100,000 a year - allocated judiciously could help him keep his best teachers longer. "We want to keep the rock-star teachers in Newark, and giving them a credible shot at raising a family on a single salary will help that," he says. Bonuses would allow him to recognize excellence while maintaining the ability to dial back his budget if economic conditions in his state deteriorate even further.

Alternatively, he's considering raising base pay for top teachers while lowering base pay for new ones. "I look at sustainable models in, say, law firms and consulting firms, industries which live and die by their talent," he says. "I know we'll try something." But first Hill wants to make sure administrators and teachers have school-wide and classroom goals and a tiered career path for teachers.

"The number-one priority for me is keeping good teachers," says Hill, who is convinced that it's the best - and maybe only - path to real education reform. "We have to develop a system that will attract the best talent in large numbers. Without great teachers there are no great schools."

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