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Philadelphia Drops Merit Pay for Teachers
Ohanian Comment: Note that the teachers union wants to bring this issue back to the table. Philadelphia teachers should demand to know why.
Philadelphia School District officials have scrapped a pilot program of performance pay for teachers, calling it too expensive, too difficult to administer, and a failure at giving teachers useful feedback.
"It simply cannot work on a broad scale in its current form," said Paul Vallas, the district's chief executive officer.
The district and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers say they will revive the issue in 2004 contract talks, which will begin soon. They are already looking closely at a Colorado district's successful system.
Vallas said that he was not opposed to pay for performance, but that he wanted to send a signal that the district expects high-quality work from all of its teachers, whether they qualify for incentive pay or not.
"People get paid a salary, and we should get excellence in return for that," he said.
After 10 months of contentious contract talks in 2000, the union and the district agreed to develop a salary system that would include teacher performance, longevity and education in determining raises.
The sides haggled for months, however, over how to measure that performance. A pilot program was to start in 2001-02, but did not get under way until January 2003 - and it cost more than $600,000.
The system, which involved multiple evaluations by assessors on a multitude of criteria, did not work as envisioned, the union's Dee Phillips said.
"Did it really measure what we wanted to measure?... No. We're back at the table, trying to come up with a measure that's going to help us and teachers be more reflective and be able to improve their practice as they go along," said Phillips, who is on a joint committee looking at the issue.
Allan Odden, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who specializes in compensation and finance, reviewed Philadelphia's system and thought it worked well, but understood the administration's concerns about cost.
Still, he said he was encouraged that Philadelphia wanted to continue with some program.
The Douglas County, Colo., district, which has had its system for nine years, rewards teams of teachers who try a new approach to improve student achievement. It also offers incentive pay to individuals who submit a portfolio of their work for consideration and those who serve as mentors.
"We see it as a best practice," said Tomas Hanna, Philadelphia's director of teacher recruitment and retention.
Instead of assessors, Douglas County's system relies on supervisors already in place, and boards made up of two-thirds teachers and one-third administrators, to judge teachers' work.
Philadelphia's struggle with pay for performance is not unfamiliar. Iowa is about to scrap a proposed system for lack of funding, and Cincinnati got rid of performance pay in May 2002. Some area districts, however, are using forms of performance pay.
After a strike in 2001, teachers in the Colonial School District, Montgomery County, settled on a plan in which schools or teachers as a whole could earn more money if goals were met. Teachers also can earn more pay for qualifying and serving as a master teacher.
The Penn-Delco and Springfield Township districts in Delaware County and Lower Moreland in Montgomery County indicated in an Inquirer survey last school year that they had some merit pay for teachers.
In Lower Moreland, teachers earned $700 stipends for projects that targeted improved learning for students and better communication with parents. The plan does not involve classroom observations.
"It was simply a way to recognize when teachers go above and beyond," said Board President Dorothy Kueny. The district and teachers' union are so pleased with the program that they recently agreed to increase the stipend to $1,000 under the new contract, she said.
Philadelphia's pilot system enrolled only 139 teacher volunteers - half as many as the slots available, officials said. Every teacher who agreed to participate was paid $1,000.
"For the most part, folks have been reluctant to opt in, and I'll be honest with you, I can't blame them because of the convoluted nature of the system," Vallas said.
Cincinnati's system was scrapped in part because teachers did not trust the assessment method and because there was not enough money allotted to assure that all qualifying teachers would get paid, union representative Denise Hewitt said.
"It's starting to look like there may be a reluctance to fund measures that are just in general pumping more money into education," said Michael Allen, program director for the Teaching Quality Policy Center for the Education Commission of the States in Denver. "People just see hard times, and they see people losing jobs and taking salary cuts. "
In Douglas County, recently ranked as the most affluent county in the nation based on per-capita income, the pay-for-performance system for teachers cost about $1.9 million in 2002-03, said Bill Hodges, assistant superintendent of human resources for the 40,000-student district, about 25 miles south of Denver.
Eighty-five percent of the district's teachers participate in at least one form of incentive pay each year.
— Susan Snyder
Phila. drops merit pay for teachers
Philadelphia Inquirer
2003-09-27
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/6871968.htm
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