Copy that

Pay for Performance

Editorial

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

COPYING. It’s one of the most encouraging trends in education today. Honest. We should all be copycats. The trick is copying the right cats. 

If you let your eyes wander in the right direction, you’ll see some great ideas out there worth stealing. 

Consider the Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP charter schools. They started in Brooklyn, N.Y., and were promptly copied in Houston, Tex. The KIPP down in Texas was such a hit that 60 Minutes did a bit about it. Ray Simon, former education honcho here in Arkansas, happened to be watching. Hesto-presto! Arkansas now has its own KIPP success story in Helena. 

See? Imitation is more than the sincerest form of flattery. When it comes to education, it’s a great way to get things done. Because folks are a lot less intimidated by change if somebody else has already done the changing. 

So let’s ever-so-slyly le-e-ean over the desk and take a peek at our neighbors’ latest work:—In Austin, Texas, the governor down there, Rick Perry, got tired of rasslin’ with that state’s legislature/teachers union (they’re often indistinguishable), so he took the steer by the horns. He used the executive authority of his office to institute the state’s first incentive-pay program for teachers. 

Incentive pay. Performance pay. Merit pay. By any name, it adds up to the same thing: the more the students learn, the more a teacher earns. 

Texas plans to use some $10 million of discretionary money from the feds for its incentive-pay program. A hundred schools tagged Economically Disadvantaged will receive grants based on improving student performance from one year to the next. Local school officials would disperse the grant money to teachers having the greatest impact. 

And Texas’ governor says he may ask its Legislature for another $25 million to expand the program, which has the backing of the business community. No surprise. Businesses don’t want a future employee pool of under-educated applicants who can’t read their own diplomas. 

All of this has the teachers unions in full hissy mode. Naturally. A merit-pay program will shift power to individual teachers, principals, and schools—and away from the unions. Which is probably why the unions tend to favor across-theboard raises. Keep ’em all indebted and in line. Like sheep. 

The unions understand that once the best teachers get a taste of this crazy concept of financial reward based on performance, it’s not going to be as easy herding teachers. They’ll start getting independent. Like professionals. 

—In Houston, the school board wants to set aside $14.5 million for incentive pay. Most of the dough would probably go to teachers who raise the test scores of their low-income students. 

That’s right. There’s that phrase again. Test scores. They’d use . . . Test Scores! (Cue lightning, clap of thunder.) Well, how else judge progress? With a mood ring? 

Can you think of a better, more objective, more transparent way to measure students’ progress than how they do on sophisticated tests that measure how much they’ve learned and how well they can put it to use? 

Are standardized tests reliable? Well, we’ve yet to hear of a student who could ace the SAT but, in the day-to-day of the classroom, couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the c and the a. 

Of course the teachers union is against Houston’s merit-pay plan. A member of its me-too chorus, a Democratic candidate for governor named Chris Bell, says merit pay will only turn teachers into “glorified test monitors.” Politics 101: When in doubt, demean. 

Better to go with those across-theboard raises, right, Candidate Bell? We all know how well those have worked since approximately forever. That is, not very well. See this country’s educational ranking among the industrialized nations of the world: High on money spent, low on achievement. 

—In Denver, Colorado, they’ve just gone plain loco. The wild west is as wild as ever. Those radicals in Denver are willing to put their tax money where their future is. A couple of weeks back, the city’s voters agreed to raise their property taxes to fund—yep—a pay-for-performance plan. 

It’s all too technically known as the Professional Compensation System for Teachers, or ProComp for short. We have an idea teachers would call it a godsend. 

Here are the details from that scrappy tabloid, the Rocky Mountain News: “The system scraps the traditional way of paying teachers based on experience and education, typical in most school districts across the nation, and instead rewards teachers based on sharpening their skills, increasing student achievement and agreeing to work in Denver’s toughest schools. . . . 

“Educators across the nation have been watching the progress of the plan, which was endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association but largely ignored by the National Education Association.”  Hold on there. The plan was endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association? The local teachers union? 

Holy dues-payers! The times, they really are a-changin’. At least in Denver. Maybe it’s the thin air. Or maybe it’s that, if you trust the people, they’ll do right by the kids. And what’s more, be willing to pay for it. (Though not a whole lot. The property tax will cost the owner of a $100,000 home about $2 a month.)     One of the reasons the teachers union in Denver supports ProComp is because performance is measured not only by test scores. (Although that’s considered, and should be.) Among other things, teachers can make more money if they specialize in courses that are in high demand—like, say, teaching English as a second language. Or if they agree to teach at one of the city’s more challenging schools. Or if they get an additional degree or do some extra coursework. All told, there are nine different ways teachers can earn more money. 

WHAT’S GOING on here? Call it the return of common sense: Champions of the status ineffective quo see merit pay as unfair because it doesn’t reward every teacher regardless of ability or effort or results. But most plain workin’ folks might see it the opposite way. They see merit pay as the fair way to go. It rewards and encourages the best while putting the worst on notice: Improve or find some line of work where you won’t be a menace to future generations. Merit pay recognizes success and penalizes failure. Gosh, just like the real world. 

No wonder so many successful businessmen are behind the idea of pay-forperformance. Because that’s how they got to be successful businessmen—by paying for performance, by recognizing and rewarding merit, by providing incentives to bring out the best in the best. 

What’s so wrong, or radical, about that? 

Nothing. Which is why we’re seeing experiments like the ones in Colorado and Texas and, hey, come to think of it, in Little Rock, Ark. Didn’t Meadowcliff Elementary award bonuses for the first time this past school year to its best teachers? 

Yes indeedy, as a favorite teacher of ours used to say. Turns out we don’t have to copy from Texas or Colorado after all, but just follow the example of our own pacesetters. 

Denver has been working on its meritpay plan since 1999, and it may take Little Rock a few years to demonstrate the value of the Meadowcliff model beyond doubt. Progress isn’t fast work. It takes time. But it will take less time if we start now. 

Change (for the better) is coming. You can feel it. You can sense it. You can read all about it in Texas and Colorado. Which kind of worries us. Arkansas better start considering a merit-pay plan for teachers lest our best and brightest leave for the Rockies or that state south and west of Texarkana. 

We need more Meadowcliffs. And we’re going to get them. We overheard something the other day that applies to ideas like merit pay at Meadowcliff: Think big, start small, scale fast. 

Let’s get going.