Merit pay: How best to decide who earns it at schools

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The notion of holding teachers accountable for their classroom performance — and paying them bonuses for a job well done — is gaining support across the country.

But what criteria should be used to judge teacher performance?

That question is especially dicey in Nevada, where a state law generally disallows using test scores to measure teacher success.

Against this backdrop, the Clark County School District is trying to better define its “pay for performance” formula — criteria that will be applied when judging who deserves bonuses at the district’s 17 empowerment schools. (State law does allow use of test scores to help judge faculty at empowerment schools, where principals are given more control over daily operations and extra funding in exchange for meeting tougher accountability measures.)

Nationally, dozens of states are experimenting with incentive pay, using widely varying formulas. In some schools, teachers earn individual bonuses, while other districts reward all campus staff, including clerical and maintenance workers, for overall achievement.

Research is ambiguous as to whether such bonuses boost student learning. Still, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is strongly in favor of merit pay, and there are hundreds of millions of dollars available in new federal grants to help states and local districts develop models.

Assessing schools’ ‘at-risk’ factors

For its part, Clark County School District officials have discovered the district hasn’t been properly following its own bonus formulas, and after it corrected the error, staff at some empowerment schools got smaller bonuses last year and the staffs at four of the campuses received no extra pay.

Bonuses for people working at empowerment schools — including office staff, librarians and custodians — are supposed to range from 0.5 percent to 2 percent of their annual salaries, depending on how well the school performs on criteria such as gains in student achievement (which accounts for half the total score), parental feedback and evaluations of campus management. Schools are eligible for bonuses even if the federal No Child Left Behind requirements for “adequate yearly progress” are not met.

But before 2009, the district had also considered whether schools served large populations of at-risk children, such as those qualifying for free and reduced-price meals, English language learners and special education students.

Those additional criteria, however, were never written into the operational manual that each empowerment school is expected to follow, said Jeremy Hauser, academic manager for the district’s Superintendent’s Schools division.

But officials think they should be.

District officials and empowerment school leaders are looking at ways to rewrite the formula so that such factors are included, Hauser said.

The district’s empowerment school strategy was launched in 2006 with four campuses. Today 17 schools are in the program.

The Clark County School Board has approved plans to award up to 15 schools conditional empowerment status without extra funding, and they would be given preferential consideration if money becomes available. The district also will apply for a federal grant to convert five of its lowest-performing schools to empowerment campuses.

At the same time, the district is toughening how incentive pay is awarded, raising the bar to require “statistically significant gains,” Hauser said.

In a memo to empowerment school employees, district officials note that bonuses are not intended just because school staffs are working harder. “From a qualitative perspective, it is known that all of our schools have worked harder, smarter, and more cooperatively than the norm to meet standards … however, pay for performance is based on the academic performance of students.”

Walter Bracken Elementary was one of four empowerment schools where staff did not receive pay-for-performance bonuses in 2008-09, down from the 1.5 percent pay hikes awarded in the prior academic year. Any disappointment was short-lived, said Principal Katie Decker. Pay for performance “is nice when you can get it,” but it’s like icing on the cake, Decker said. And the cake is being an empowerment school.

Her third, fourth and fifth grade teachers, using some of the discretionary money and authority allocated to them under the empowerment model, tried a new approach to writing instruction and completed a professional development course to prepare. Student writing scores jumped 22 percent in one year, and the first and second grade teachers have since signed on to the initiative.

“They chose their path, with no involvement by me,” said Decker, whose campus is starting its third year of empowerment status. “When teachers take ownership, things can change dramatically.”

Supporters of merit bonuses say the standard pay scale for teachers doesn’t offer enough incentives for individuals to excel, or to stay in a profession where they are undervalued. Opponents say the formulas often rely too heavily on a principal’s subjective assessment of teacher performance, and often force colleagues to compete against one another for a limited pot of money.

Reward whole campus, or just teachers?

Nevada school districts have not settled on one model for incentive pay. Keith Rheault, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction, said he prefers Clark County’s model of merit pay being shared by an entire campus rather than singling out individual teachers for bonuses.

“It keeps up morale to have everyone working together as a team,” Rheault said. “At an elementary school you can focus on the classroom teacher, but what about the technology specialist or the P.E. teacher? The student achievement can’t be as easily tied to them, but their involvement is obviously a contributing factor.”

Although the “one for all and all for one” approach has proved popular with teachers unions — including the Clark County Education Association — it also undercuts the purpose of incentive pay, said Andy Smarick, a visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit policy think tank.

“There’s a wide variation in quality among teachers in schools, and you end up treating them all the same,” said Smarick, who worked previously for the U.S. Education Department and is writing a book on urban campuses. “You end up not rewarding the ones who should be rewarded, and rewarding the ones who shouldn’t be rewarded.”

As for the Clark County School District’s plans to make the “at risk” factors part of the official formula, Smarick said it’s a smart approach.

“If teachers know they can get paid a little more to work in the toughest schools with the toughest students, it raises the incentive to take on the challenge,” Smarick said. “At the same time, we know there are groups of students that are going to have a tougher time reaching proficiency. If you want to close those achievement gaps, you need to make sure you have the best schools and the best teachers for those students.”