by Jason Wiest
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Friday, August 25, 2006
The state’s largest school district wants to expand its pilot program that awards teachers bonuses based on their students’ test score improvements.
On Thursday night, the Little Rock School Board voted 6-1 to approve expanding the Achievement Challenge Pilot Program to three more schools: Geyer Springs, Mabelvale and Romine elementaries. At each of the three schools, a majority of teachers will have to vote in favor of the plan before it can be implemented on those campuses.
Those schools would join Wakefield and Meadowcliff elementaries in offering bonuses to teachers whose students show academic improvement. Two other schools — Stephens and Rockefeller elementaries — offered bonuses during the past two academic years using a different initiative, the Teacher Advancement Program.
Dozens of Wakefield Elementary teachers who turned out to support merit pay applauded the board’s decision to continue and expand the incentives.
“I don’t know of anyone who becomes an educator for the money,” said Kim Romain, a classroom teacher at Wakefield Elementary. “However, it’s nice to be recognized for the pro- fessionals we are and receive bonuses for gains our students make.”
The Little Rock School District will cover the 2006-07 bonus costs for Meadowcliff and Wakefield elementaries, at $205,000 and $230,000, respectively.
Private organizations would fund teacher bonuses at:
Geyer Springs Elementary, $200,000 from the Brown Foundation of Houston.
Mabelvale Elementary, $225,000 from the Hussman Foundation. Walter E. Hussman Jr. of the foundation is the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Romine Elementary, $200,000 from the Walton Family Foundation.
Additionally, the Walton Family Foundation would pay for the district to hire researchers from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville to evaluate the program.
School Board member Baker Kurrus questioned whether having the Walton Family Foundation pay for the study while also funding bonuses was a conflict of interest.
But officials said a parallel evaluation would be conducted by the district’s Planning, Research and Evaluation Department.
Wakefield and Meadowcliff elementary school students’ SAT-10 test scores — the ones on which the bonuses are based — have improved since the program was put in place.
But those results drew mixed reactions from teachers and board members.
Katherine Mitchell, the only School Board member to vote against the merit-pay program, asked why teachers at Meadowcliff should continue to be rewarded when the program already has been proven to work there and when teachers at other schools would like the bonuses.
And Grainger Ledbetter, executive director of the Little Rock Classroom Teachers Association, said that while student scores on the SAT-10 rose at the schools with the pilot program, test scores also rose at schools that didn’t have the program.
He questioned why the district would reward teachers for improvements on a test that doesn’t matter as far as the federal government is concerned.
The Arkansas Benchmark Exam — not the SAT-10 — is the test the state uses to determine whether a school is complying with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
And Wakefield Elementary’s scores on that test went down last year, the first year the payfor-performance plan, “a questionable program that hasn’t shown any real improvement on student achievement,” was implemented, Ledbetter said.
Still, he said the union is committed to following its contract with the district and will abide by whatever the teachers decide.
The excitement among Wakefield Elementary teachers at the meeting was shared by some of the board members.
“This is a pilot project,” Kurrus said. “If it really works and it’s good, I think it needs to be institutionalized.”
But district Superintendent Roy Brooks pointed out that the program never was intended to go districtwide — to all 48 campuses — because it is not “financially sustainable.”
He does hope that a new Teacher Reward Study Commission will develop a financially sustainable, long-term and districtwide program.
The commission — to consist of teachers, parents, administrators, Parent Teacher Association members and community members — will be organized to conduct research on similar programs in other states, to evaluate the program’s results in the 26,000-student Little Rock district and to make a recommendation on such a model.
School districts throughout Texas and Florida, as well as in Denver and Cincinnati, are among public school systems that have some type of teacher pay-for-performance plan.
The Little Rock district has several advantages over those districts as far as determining the program’s success goes, said Jay Greene, head of the UA education reform department and one of the officials who would work on the evaluation.
Schools where the program is being tested have years’ worth of data on student test scores to compare, he said. They also use nationally standardized tests, such as the SAT-10, which he said are better suited for gauging student improvement.
He added that the program is being phased in at different schools. If test scores improve at each school in its first year, that would help ensure that the program, not some other factor, is boosting the scores, he said.
