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Teachers unhappy tying pay to results Education 2000: Reforming Schools for a New Century Thursday, August 31, 2000 By Pamela R. Winnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
A suburban school district in Pennsylvania will make history by giving cash rewards to its top-performing teachers.
Part One: The high stakes of assessment testing
Part Three: Technology closes distance between teacher and student
But there's one major glitch: The teachers don't want the money.
In fact, all 350 teachers in the district have signed a petition vowing to give their bonuses to charity.
Last year, the Colonial School District in Montgomery County became one of the few districts in the country to institute performance-based pay, a highly controversial system designed to reward teachers whose pupils perform well on standardized tests. In December, the district will single out the top 10 percent to 20 percent of its teachers and reward them with bonuses of up to $2,800.
But performance-based pay, at least in Pennsylvania, has pitted some reform-minded educators against teachers and their unions.
Proponents argue that given the current state of public education, incentives are needed to reward those teachers who get tangible results -- much as businesses might reward salespeople who exceed their sales quotas.
But unions and teachers say the private-sector model doesn't work in public schools, that performance-based pay destroys the team spirit that teaching requires.
And, even more to the point, teachers say standardized tests are an inadequate measure of student achievement and shouldn't be linked to teacher rewards.
Still, with pressure mounting nationally to hold teachers accountable for student performance, a handful of local unions have agreed to performance-based pay. Their varying experiences show both the pitfalls and the advantages of the system.
In 1997, while negotiating its collective bargaining agreement, the Colonial Education Association, the teachers union, agreed in principle to the concept of performance-based pay. The system applies to teachers as well as nonteaching educators, such as guidance counselors, librarians and nurses.
"We had no choice," said Brian Gallagher, the union's president. "We needed a contract."
But when the two sides couldn't agree on the particulars of the system, the matter went to arbitration. Last year, an arbitrator ruled that out of an available pot of $200,000, half would be used for group awards, the other $100,000 to reward top performing teachers.
The group awards might go to, for example, teachers in the fourth and fifth grades, or teachers in the kindergarten to third-grade buildings, or teachers in specific high school departments.
"One of the problems with the system," said Don Atkiss, field director of the Pennsylvania State Education Association's mideastern region, "is that it assumes that only 20 percent of teachers are going to perform well. That's offensive."
"Generally, we feel that performance pay has a lot of potential to get teachers focused," said Eileen Kellor, a researcher at the Consortium for Public Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the Colonial School District. "But the problem with Colonial's system is that it doesn't provide for everyone to succeed. From a design element that's a problem."
During the 1999-2000 academic year, all 4,714 pupils in the district were tested for performance, mostly through standardized tests. Pupils in grades three, four, six and seven took the TerraNova Multiple Assessments tests; pupils in grades five, eight and 11 took the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests. Pupils in lower grades were measured based on more subjective criteria, including "competence in the social/emotional domain," "mastery in academic areas" and "competence in the psychomotor domain."
Nonteaching staff, such as nurses, guidance counselors and librarians, were evaluated based on surveys completed by pupils and parents.
One year into the plan, participants disagree whether it's a success.
Pat Iannelli, director of educational services for the district, said Colonial is "very pleased with test score improvement" in tests administered at the beginning and end of the school year.
But since the district hadn't administered standardized tests before it introduced performance-based pay, Iannelli said, it can't definitively attribute test-score improvement to the new system.
Teachers say the system doesn't work.
"It's totally off the wall," said Atkiss. "Colonial's system is a perfect example of why these plans don't work."
Gallagher, who teaches eighth-grade English at Colonial Middle School, related the following anecdote to illustrate what he sees as one of many flaws in the use of standardized tests:
Faced with an unruly class one day, he threatened his pupils with detention. One replied: "We'll bomb on our tests and you won't get your bonus."
The potential for abuse incenses Gallagher. So does the system's reliance on standardized tests.
By emphasizing test preparation to the exclusion of other areas -- in the case of English, subjects such as poetry and writing -- the system, Gallagher said, actually robs pupils of a real education.
"It turns kids into robots," he said.
Moreover, he and others say that standardized tests do not necessarily reflect a teacher's competence. Test results are influenced by factors other than instruction, such as parental influence and economic factors.
At the national level, teachers unions have opposed the concept. At its annual convention in July, the National Education Association defeated a measure that would have supported a performance-based pay plan for teachers.
"It's extremely difficult to judge the performance of one teacher against another," said Kathleen Lyons, spokeswoman for the 2.5 million-member union. "We should be focusing on what helps kids."
"It's a bad idea to single out teachers" for rewards, said Albert Fondy, president of the Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania federations of teachers. "It prevents them from sharing. You want teachers to work together."
Teachers in the Denver School District have a more guarded reaction to their own system of performance-based pay.
Last year, their union, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, agreed to a four-year pilot program for some of its 129 schools. The plan can't be formally implemented until November 2003, when the district's 4,300 teachers are scheduled to vote on it.
"We're changing the criteria as we go along," said Becky Wissink, a teacher and part of a four-member committee that is designing the system.
What makes Denver's system different -- and what might spell the difference between failure and success -- is the involvement of teachers. Some highlights of the Denver plan include:
All participating teachers receive $500 bonuses in the first year, regardless of performance. Those singled out as meeting their objectives receive an additional $500 -- up to a maximum of $1,500 -- for each objective achieved.
"It's too early to tell if it's a success," Wissink said. "But our teachers have agreed to try it. We're going to base our opinion on how it unfolds over the remaining three years."
Some teachers in Denver believe the system may discourage teachers from working with low achievers. Others believe it is accomplishing its purpose.
"I think you focus more now on what your object is," said Sue Sterkel, a math teacher.
Two years ago, the Columbus, Ohio, school district introduced a performance-based pay system that gives bonuses of up to $500 a teacher to schools that meet certain goals, including improvement on standardized tests and attendance rates. Last year, teachers in about half the 144 schools in the district were eligible for bonuses.
Both sides agree that the system of group-based performance pay may be working. Key to its success, said Greg Scott, an attorney who negotiated the collective bargaining agreement, is teacher buy-in.
"You can't expect teachers to be cheerleaders for performance-based pay," he said, "but we're fortunate to have a pretty responsible association."
John Grossman, president of the Columbus Education Association, agrees the system might be working.
"People are making progress," he said. "We see nothing wrong with that."
Grossman said, however, that using standardized tests "is a real questionable practice" that "encourages cheating."
"There's a real problem in offering money for good test results," he said.
Beginning with this school year, the district's 5,000 teachers will become eligible for individual performance-based bonuses of up to $2,000 each, payable in the 2001-02 school year. As with Denver, participation is voluntary and teachers will be involved in developing the criteria.
So far, both the administration and the union in Columbus agree on one critical detail: Performance pay for individual teachers will not be based on standardized tests.
"It's not fair to judge teachers based on standardized tests," Scott said. "Students in urban districts don't perform as well."
Ed Christy, western region field director of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said he knows of no local teacher contracts in which performance-based pay is in effect or negotiations in which it is being discussed.
"As an organization, we opposed it because we have never seen a system that functions because there are so many variables beyond the teacher. The teacher is being measured, but the teacher does not have total control," he said.
In Colonial School District, the issue of performance-based pay will come up again next year when the union renegotiates its collective bargaining agreement.
Gallagher and others say that, next time around, they won't agree to it.
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Teachers participate only if they agree to it. Last year, 342 of the district's 4,300 teachers agreed.