Pittsburgh Public Schools teachers and school board will decide on Monday whether to accept a new collective bargaining agreement that embraces performance pay as part of the district's efforts to improve the caliber of education in city schools.

District administrators and teachers union officials say the proposed contract reflects the principle that teachers who have a proven record of excellence ought to earn more in handsome salary increases and bonuses than their equally proven mediocre colleagues.

However, the five-year contract -- which will take effect from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2015, if approved -- also includes a two-tier salary scale that reflects the antipathy of current teachers to the idea of performance pay.

The contract provides about $33.3 million in total pay increases for the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers.

Teachers are voting by secret ballots, which must be received by 4 p.m. Monday, after which they will be counted. The school board will meet in special session at 7:15 p.m. Monday at board headquarters in Oakland.

According to the contract, which was unanimously approved by union leadership last week, the district's approximately 2,900 teachers will remain on a traditional 10-step salary schedule in which their pay increases happen automatically every year.

On this scale, a beginning teacher with a bachelor's degree at the first step earned $39,210 in 2009-10. That teacher will be able to move through the steps, fully reaching the top step in the 11th year. In 2010-11, the top-step salary for a teacher with a bachelor's degree will be $77,300 a year, growing to $83,300 a year in 2014-15. Teachers with master's degrees will earn $4,000 a year more.

All teachers at the top of the pay scale -- about 1,700 of them -- will each receive a $1,500 pay increase annually over the life of this contract.

Those at the top also will receive a $1,000 bonus each year that the district achieves adequate yearly progress, known as AYP. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, public schools and districts must make AYP by meeting certain achievement levels each year on state math and reading tests or face sanctions.

Current teachers not yet at the top of the pay scale will see an additional $500 in their annual salary step increases.

Also retained in the contract are longevity bonuses of $2,200 a year for teachers who have attained 22 years of experience in the district, and the teachers/professionals increment of $2,000 a year for those who completed 14 years with the district.

But what is a rather stable contract for current teachers also includes a fundamental change in how the district's teachers hired in the future will be paid.

District Superintendent Mark Roosevelt and teachers union President John Tarka said this contract was tailor-made for a school system in transition.

Teachers hired after July 1 will enter the district on a new pay scale that essentially changes the time needed to attain tenure from three years to four years. It also pegs their compensation directly to how well they perform in the classroom.

"It's a new world," said Mr. Tarka, 64, who taught English and speech at Pittsburgh Westinghouse High School for many years before joining union leadership.

With more than 40 years in one role or another in the city schools, Mr. Tarka echoes the sentiment of Mr. Roosevelt, the former Massachusetts politician turned school executive.

"You don't have to teach in the Pittsburgh Public Schools," Mr. Tarka said, "but if you choose to, this is how it's going to be from now on."

Still, district administrators and union officials agree they have jarring gaps to fill in the merit-pay plan they have devised -- among them the method of evaluating teachers.

"We know that there are still issues we have to work out. For example, how do you evaluate a sixth-grade art teacher?" Mr. Roosevelt said. "So we're still working on what this model will look like, but we think we have a framework for a plan that is fair to teachers and does not set unrealistic expectations."

Mr. Tarka said the union would be intensively involved in crafting the teacher-evaluation model that ultimately will drive performance pay.

What's more, he said, "what we have agreed upon here is a broad-based approach with multiyear evaluations and [it] is not simply based on test scores."

Under the new salary scale, an extra year has been added to the traditional 10-step schedule. New teachers will be expected to spend that first year in training at a teachers academy. Their pay will be $39,000.

After the first year, their salary increases by $1,000 annually for three years. In the fourth year -- if the district grants them tenure -- their salary jumps by $6,000 to $48,000.

Starting in the fifth year of the new scale, a teacher who meets a minimum standard of satisfactory and is not considered exceptional would see a $2,000 salary increase each year, topping out at the career rate of $60,000 in the 11th year. The new scale does not differentiate between teachers who have master's degrees from those with bachelor's degrees. It also does not offer longevity or teacher professional increment bonuses.

Teachers may fail to advance in pay annually if they are rated unsatisfactory, according to a new system the district plans to roll out this fall.

Jody Spolar, the district's chief performance officer, said the new scale has significant increases built into it at three-year intervals.

At each interval, teachers with a proven record of excellence not only will have a salary step increase, but also will begin to move into steps of "professional growth levels" where their salary begins to jump by $3,000, $4,000 and then $10,000 annually at each step.

In the first level, an effective teacher's salary could grow from $55,000 in the fifth year to $61,000 in the seventh year. At that point, if the teacher continues in the same professional growth category, the teacher hits top scale at $70,000 in the 11th year.

Or a teacher can be advanced to one of two other categories where his or her salary would jump to either $72,000 or $80,000, attaining the top scale at either $80,000 or $100,000 respectively, depending on performance.

Under this scale, teachers with the same years of experience could reach the top of the pay scale in five different performance categories. There will be those making less than $60,000; then $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 or $100,000.

Seated in his first-floor office in the district headquarters along Bellefield Avenue, Mr. Roosevelt, 54, said the performance pay model that the district and union officials agreed upon -- to apply to only new teachers -- reflects general ambivalence in education circles towards the efficacy of performance pay.

"We looked all over the country for a model we could [adapt], and what we learned is that the policy is ahead of the research on this issue," said Mr. Roosevelt.

Research, he added, does not back the conventional wisdom that an outright merit-pay regime imposed on all teachers at once significantly boosts student achievement.

"That's why we insisted that this cannot be applied to all of our membership," said Mr. Tarka.

By the same token, however, the teachers' union understands that efforts to reform public education, especially in urban districts like Pittsburgh, must include a model that holds teachers accountable to a standard of performance, said George Gensure, the union's vice president for high schools and a longtime contract negotiator.

"We have done a great job of educating a certain percentage of students over the years. Now we are called upon to be better than we have been in the past -- to change. It's a huge cultural adjustment for us, but one that we must embrace to shape our destiny," said Mr. Gensure, 62, who taught high school math for many years before joining union leadership.

Mr. Tarka and Mr. Gensure said that even teachers who have long been entrenched in the job and salary security of union protection and have opposed performance pay will realize the incentives of salary increases and bonuses.

To that end, the district plans to roll out two performance-based bonus programs and a new career ladder -- which includes six positions that offer salary increases between $9,300 and $13,300 -- to attract current teachers into the merit-pay model.

The bonus programs include a pilot --Voluntary Incentive Earnings at Work, or VIEW -- in which teachers will subject themselves to evaluations that could earn them up to $8,000 in bonuses annually. The program is designed to start out with 75 teachers in the 2011-2012 school year and will add 50 teachers each year until 2014.

A group of 12 teachers and two administrators will design that program in the 2010-11 school year. They will meet after school to study all kinds of performance pay programs, and their findings and recommendations will be the basis of VIEW.

Selected by nomination of teachers at all levels of the district, members of that group will receive a stipend for their work.

Top-scale teachers who enroll in the program would have to forgo their annual $1,500 pay increases during the life of the contract. But in each year they earn a bonus, they can add 40 percent of it to their base salary for subsequent years.

And starting in the 2011-12 school year, teachers at schools that attain significant gains in student achievement -- as established by a new Students and Teachers Achieving Results program, or STAR -- will receive a bonus of $6,000 a year on top of the salary they otherwise would earn on scale.

The district plans to award the STAR bonus to teachers in at least eight schools each year if schools fall within the top 15 percent of most improved schools in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Gensure said the programs were based on the idea that given a chance to make more money, great teachers don't mind the challenge of a performance-pay system.

"What we are doing here is trying to adapt to the changing landscape in urban education," Mr. Tarka said. "We know the world has changed, and we have to move along; but we're not going to let the change be foisted on us."

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