Linking Teacher to Student Scores - education

School Administrator, Oct, 2000 by SCOTT LaFEE

A suburban Philadelphia district takes a bold step to attach annual performance bonuses to improved standardized test scores

The topic is linking teacher salaries to student test scores, and Stan Durtan, superintendent of the Colonial School District in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., sounds both weary and wary.

"There hasn't been a day this year when someone from the media or another school district hasn't called wanting to talk about it," sighs Durtan, who has headed the Colonial district, just outside Philadelphia, for more than 11 years. "The pressure here has been tremendous."

But perhaps not surprising. When the Colonial school board voted earlier this year to pay individual teachers annual bonuses based upon their students' standardized student test scores, the prosperous suburban district became the first in the country to do so. It also became a real-life test case for an idea that has proven to be enormously factious.

Newfound Interest

On one side, proponents believe compensation based on student achievement is the ultimate measure of teaching accountability and educational improvement. On the other, opponents counter that merit pay linked to test scores is both grossly unfair and fundamentally flawed. What happens at Colonial may prove someone's point, though whose remains to be seen.

"A lot of people are watching," says Kathie Christie, a policy analyst at the Education Commission of the States in Denver.

Of course, the idea of merit pay per se in education is not new. It was first proposed in the 1920s and over the years the idea has been attempted in various forms in various school districts with various results. The belief that schools can be run more like business, with a keener eye toward efficiency, production and the bottom line, has plenty of supporters. At the 1999 National Education Summit, for example, governors and business leaders included it in their official platform, calling upon school districts to implement "pay-for-performance incentive plans ... based on lessons learned from the private sector."

Roughly half the states, according to Education Week, have passed or are considering legislation involving merit pay in schools. In Florida, all school districts must include performance components in their teacher salary schedules. And at least a dozen districts, from the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District with more than 711,000 students to Colonial with 4,700 students, want compensation to be linked directly to student performance on standardized tests.

"The system right now has failed a great many of our students," Howard Miller, chief operating officer of L.A. Unified, told the Los Angeles Times. "We believe that proof of performance has to precede additional funding (for teacher salaries)."

But merit pay has its share of detractors, too, and a history rich in failure. Harvard University researchers Richard Murnane and David Cohen concluded in a 1986 study that merit pay was not an "effective strategy for motivating teachers to achieve high performance levels." The idea, they said, was just too problematic, an all-around bad fit. In most districts where the idea was tried, Murnane and Cohen reported, the practice was abandoned within five years.

An Economist's Backing

Nonetheless, merit pay remains an incredibly powerful and attractive ideal, particularly in these times when a vibrant economy convinces many people that a lot of problems can be solved if there's a good business model.

Among them is Anita Summers, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton business school and the mother of U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers. Anita Summers is a highly respected designer of compensation systems and a staunch believer that the U.S. public education system has consistently lacked "one of the major ways that good economies work in terms of encouraging people to do better--specifically, that student achievement is the bottom line and if compensation for teachers and administrators doesn't take that into account, then it's not connected to good education."

Summers was contacted in 1998 by Jeffrey Sultanik, counsel to the Colonial school board, when contract negotiations between the district and the local teachers' union stalled. The board wanted a compensation plan that linked teacher pay to student performance; the union did not. Eventually, a fact-finder was called in. Summers' job was to testify on behalf of the district that it was possible to accurately identify and evaluate teaching ability based upon standardized test scores and other data. The fact-finder ultimately agreed, issuing a report that called upon the district and union to work out details for such a system.

For nearly a year, a joint committee tried. When it failed, the parties turned to binding arbitration, and in August 1999, arbitrator Joseph Bloom ordered the precedent-setting implementation of a merit pay system for both individuals (which the board wanted) and for groups (which the union preferred). Among the stipulations: Participation would be mandatory. All 350 teachers in the district would be covered, plus other professional positions such as counselors and school nurses.