Legislator, ex-teacher urges merit-pay rules
Posted on Tuesday, March 28, 2006
In the wake of last week's overwhelming defeat of a trial teacher merit-pay project in Little Rock, a state senator said Monday that he will introduce legislation early next year setting parameters for any incentive plans formulated by Arkansas school districts.
Also on Monday, Kathy Smith, an officer with the foundation that would have paid for most of Little Rock's two-year pilot project, said the Walton Family Foundation won't abandon the state's largest district but wants to talk with school district leaders after this week's spring break vacation about "what's next."
"We certainly still have an interest in incentive- and payfor-performance programs,"said Smith, education program officer for the Bentonville-based organization. "There are a lot of options that we could talk about. Of course it depends on what is allowable within their contracts, with what their board would support and what the district itself feels appropriate."
On Friday, Little Rock elementary classroom teachers voted 256 against and 42 in favor of a plan that would have provided 50 teachers next year and an additional 50 teachers the following year with bonuses based on the achievement gains of their students on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Teachers, who would have been randomly selected for the program from among those who voluntarily applied to participate, could have earned bonuses of up to $ 10, 000 a year.
According to the terms of the contract between the district and its teachers, the proposed pay-for-performance plan had to receive approval from 75 percent of all 471 of the district's elementary classroom teachers, regardless of whether teachers voted in the election. Only 14 percent of the total 298 teachers who voted during a 12-hour span at the district's administration building endorsed the proposal.
The pilot project would have put the Little Rock district more firmly in league with school systems in Houston, Denver, Cincinnati and throughout the state of Florida that are trying an assortment of teacher merit-pay programs. Some of those rely solely on student test scores while others consider multiple factors.
While very few, if any, Arkansas districts besides Little Rock are looking hard at meritpay plans right now, Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, D-Crossett, said he wants to be in the driver's seat on the matter.
"I have never been a proponent of merit pay,"said Jeffress, a retired music teacher," but I think if we are going to have it in the state, we might as well be proactive and define what it would be. I would rather define it according to my terms. I'm not saying we are going to ban merit pay and never have it, but I want to be in on setting the limits and defining how it should be done."
His legislation would require any merit-pay proposal to be made available to all teachers within a building or within a district, Jeffress said. The faculty and staff must help create the plan and approve it, he said. And thirdly, a district that adopts a merit-pay system cannot limit the criteria for awarding bonus pay to only student test scores.
That's because any program that covers all teachers must have a basis for paying music, art, physical education and other teachers whose subjects may not be covered in a state or nationally standardized test, he said.
"I was a chorale music teacher for 28 years. I truly think that if anyone had rated me, I would have gotten a pretty good rating,"he said, recalling that his program attracted students who did well in contests and whose performances were well regarded in the community. "There are a lot of measurement things out there besides testing that show that you have a good program that has value and worth."Jeffress said he was not surprised by the outcome of the Little Rock teacher election and would have voted against it himself. He viewed the proposal as a possible effort to break the district's teacher union or a "backdoor effort"by those who've lost faith in public education to move toward the use of publicly funded vouchers to public schools.
GOALS OF FOUNDATION Smith said the Walton foundation is interested in working with districts besides Little Rock on teacher incentive pay, but Little Rock is attractive to the foundation in part because teachers in the district have an understanding of how to assess students, then use the data from those assessments to identify academic weaknesses and teach to those needs. That data is the result of an assessment program used in more that half of the district's schools that is operated by the Public Education Foundation of Little Rock.
"That's key,"Smith said about student data as a basis for teacher incentive pay plans. "You have to be able to understand the data and what you can do to impact the data,"she said.
Individual schools in the district are interested in wholeteacher performance pay plans, and supporting those schools may be an option, Smith said. Four Little Rock elementary schools - Rockefeller, Stephens, Meadowcliff and Wakefield - have teacher pay-forperformance plans already in place.
"Little Rock has a strong and committed board and leadership willing to do some innovative things to see how they can narrow the achievement gap and improve the performance of all their students,"Smith said. "That's our goal as well."
A variety of perspectives on Friday's vote were expressed Monday. Gov. Mike Huckabee, who said in January that a merit-pay plan for teachers is "an absolute must,"reported through his spokesman that he was disappointed in the outcome and he didn't expect to propose any merit-pay legislation until the General Assembly meets in regular session in January 2007.
RESEARCH LOSES OUT Gary Ritter, associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, lamented the lost opportunity for collecting data. UA would have received $ 97, 000 over two years by the Walton Family Foundation to evaluate whether a financial incentive to teachers would have resulted in improved student achievement. "As a researcher, I'm disappointed that we are not going to be doing it in Little Rock this year because I think we would have learned lots of neat stuff about the potential for these types of programs,"Ritter said. "The district is moving ahead with merit pay anyway. They are doing it one school at a time, in a way that makes it difficult to learn about the impact."
Tom Kimbrell, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators, said he is unaware of merit-pay plans being developed across the state with the exception of a handful of schools that use the Teacher Advancement Program that rewards teachers based in part on extra duties as well as student achievement.
Asked about the lack of interest, Kimbrell cited the focus of the state's educators in developing a constitutional school-funding system and the recognition that districts in other states have had trouble in finding fair ways to evaluate teachers.
He said he hasn't seen such a system yet.
"I would have loved to have found a way to reward teachers who were being very successful in the classroom with all levels of learners,"said Kimbrell, a former superintendent.
"I saw that and recognized that. As an individual I could go in and see a lot of that happening. But that was one person's observation and one person's judgment as to a teacher's effectiveness."
Cathy Koehler, an elementary school media specialist in the Little Rock district and a member of the Classroom Teachers Association's contract negotiating team, said Monday that the association's priority is the 2006-07 teacher contract.
But she also said that members will ultimately be surveyed about their interest in a plethora of incentive plans.
Friday's vote was open to both members and nonmembers of the Classroom Teachers Association.
"Seeing how wide that margin was, that was not just CTA members voting against it,"Koehler said.
"There is just not support for a plan that targets a limited number of people."
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