Linking Teacher to Student Scores - education

School Administrator, Oct, 2000 by SCOTT LaFEE

Jeanne Allen begs to differ. Allen is president of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that advocates ideas like charter schools and vouchers. She does not like pay-for-performance plans that reward teachers for simply acquiring new credentials or certifications. Nor does she support whole-school incentive programs.

"You should be able to judge actual teacher pay based on the gains a student makes from year to year," Allen says. "Anything else is phony."

Cincinnati's Plan

Even so, numerous school districts are pushing ahead with their variations on the theme.

In Denver last year, the teachers' union approved a pilot program that gives $500 bonuses to participating teachers if their students meet negotiated goals on standardized tests. The program is slated to run for two years. In the third year, union members will vote on whether to continue it.

More recently, the Cincinnati Public Schools system and its teachers union announced agreement of a compensation system based solely on performance. "We have never in the history of school reform reached the point where we've aligned compensation, professional development and evaluation," Cincinnati superintendent Steven J. Adamowski told a news conference announcing the plan in May. "Without that, you essentially end up with an organization with goals but no relationship between the goals and how people are compensated. No high-performing organization in the world can operate that way, and we're not going to any more.

Essentially, the Cincinnati plan calls for every teacher in the district to be evaluated at least once every five years. The evaluations would be conducted by an administrator and lead teacher and would examine 16 criteria, from planning and preparation to professionalism. Teachers will be ranked in one of five escalating categories, from "novice" to "accomplished." Each category has a corresponding pay range, which can be augmented by taking on certain jobs or acquiring additional credentials.

Kathleen Ware, the associate superintendent who helped develop the plan, says there is no direct evaluation link to student test scores. "But it's something we will keep track of. Teachers at the top two levels should in fact have classrooms where significant (standardized test score) gains occur. We'll look at the teachers collectively and the students collectively to determine the correlations there. If the gains aren't happening, we'll go back and revisit the standards because they should be."

Ware says connecting individual compensation to student test scores was never an issue because both sides recognized inherent problems, principally concerns about statistical reliability. On the other hand, the 45,000-student Cincinnati district will offer schoolwide incentives if more than 75 percent of predesignated targets are reached in a year. In such cases, Ware said, professional staffs at qualifying schools will receive $1,400 bonuses.

"I think accountability is an issue that will not and should not go away, Ware adds. "We need to be accountable and I think our approach is, by far, the superior way to go. Of course, we'll be watching what happens in other districts and time will tell."