September 16, 2011 09:02 AM UTC

Case Study in Performance Pay for Teachers

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• by: cdsmith

( – promoted by ProgressiveCowgirl)

Advocates for school reform would do well to pay attention to what’s happening right now in Colorado Springs School District 2.

The Background

District 2 has jumped full speed ahead on the performance pay for teachers train, and it’s starting to look a lot less appealing a year in than it did up front.  In advance, it looked like the district did a lot of things right: they went out of their way to define a large number of different factors that go into evaluating teacher performance: improvement in student achievement, evaluation by peers and staff, and other factors.  They went out of their way to define student achievement in a way that takes into account different levels of parent support, economics, motivation, etc.  Far from being an excuse for cutting teacher pay, the district raised the top end of the salary range to $90,000.

A good overview of the way the system was designed can be found on Education News Colorado’s web site.  The summary is that the school completely replaces seniority with a 9-level ranking system, from Novice to Master.  At the end of each year, standards are set for moving up or down a level along that scale.  To move up from Novice just requires a satisfactory evaluation, but all levels above that include results-based goals as well.

The Situation

Today, things don’t look nearly so good.

The district immediately lost a large number of teachers.  You might expect these were teachers that were worried about their salaries in the new system.  You’d be wrong.  Overwhelmingly, the teachers that left over this were those that the new program should have rewarded most; the teachers that involved parents were most happy about.  The teachers that just got by?  A few of them lost their jobs, but a lot of them are still there, and still just getting by.

I personally know one of those teachers that left.  I still remember her excitement at the program when it first started.  I remember her increasing level of disappointment as it became clear that the evaluation process was not really rewarding proficient teachers at all.  I remember the number of times that the people supposedly evaluating her told her flat-out that everyone was very impressed by her teaching, but they were forced to go down the checklist and ask a fixed set of questions, and she didn’t follow the formula as well as less inspired teachers did.  Today she no longer teaches in the district, instead starting her own education reform project for a fraction of the income.

The Colorado Springs Gazette ran a story today covering the current goings-on in the district, which gives some more insight into things going on:

• very high teacher turnover across the board
  

• many classes taught entirely by substitutes as the district can’t even find enough full-time teachers for their existing classes
  

• extremely large class sizes
  

• student protests
  

• angry, shouting parents outside school board meetings
  

Conclusions?

It’s tempting to say this is the same old story about conservatives destroying public schools while claiming to be “reformers”.  But that would also be wrong.  The master architect of this whole plan?  Mike Miles.  Yes, that’s Mike “The Real Liberal Candidate for U.S. Senate” Miles.  This wasn’t conservative faux-reform sabotage.  It was an honest attempt to build the best teacher performance pay system they could… and it failed miserably.

This raises some very interesting questions about education reform:

• Is performance pay for teachers fundamentally broken, or did the district do it wrong?
  

• If they did it wrong, what exactly should have been done differently?
  

• If this is happening here, what’s in store for other districts (or states) looking at teacher accountability as the silver bullet for improving schools?
  

Personally, I’ve always considered myself in general agreement with school reform but just deeply skeptical of the obviously anti-education groups and people that typically advocate it.  This is, therefore, an especially compelling cautionary tale for me.

Thoughts?