Interest renewed in tying teacher pay to student achievement

The Henrico County school system is poised to start a pilot program in which teacher pay would be tied to student performance.

It is the only school system in the Richmond area to consider such a program.

"We've been talking about that in Henrico for the last two years now," said Patrick Kinlaw, assistant superintendent for administrative services. "We've done a study of the literature, and we're ready to explore our own internal performance-based incentive pay program."

The school system is waiting for Congress to authorize hundreds of millions in funding for performance-based pay programs for teachers, he said.

President Barack Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have rekindled a national discussion on tying teacher pay to student achievement. Obama has recommended $487 million in funding in fiscal 2010 -- up from $97 million the previous year -- for the Teacher Incentive Fund to support performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-needs schools.

The promise of more funding might get school systems to consider trying performance incentive pay programs, said Christopher Corallo, the Henrico schools' director of staff development.

"From what we've seen and read, the federal government is approaching this concept appropriately and wisely, giving the state and localities the opportunity to decide what it means to them," he said. "The devil is in the details. There are many types of performance-based pay."

Henrico school officials provided few details on their internal performance-based program. They plan to apply for the Teacher Advancement Program and start with a small number of teachers who will enter into incentive contracts beyond their regular contracts. Among the many factors for determining incentive pay would be student achievement.

While the Henrico schools are ready to give performance-based pay a chance, Richmond, Chesterfield County and Hanover County say it is not something they are considering.

"The superintendent [Marcus J. Newsome] asked us two years ago to look at the compensation part, to take a look at incentive programs for teachers who work in schools that may be having difficulty," said Lyle Evans, Chesterfield's assistant superintendent of human resources and administrative services.

"All that kind of got turned upside down with the changes in the budget cycle. It was an issue of, can we give raises period, much less have a plan to pay teachers differential pay because of performance."

The traditional compensation system for teachers is based mostly on experience and education, said Jo Lynne DeMary, former state superintendent of education and director of the Center for School Improvement at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Education.

"There's nothing that ties compensation to teacher performance," she said. "If, in fact, the major purpose of effective teaching is student achievement, then such achievement needs to be part of that evaluation process."

Nine times out of 10, teachers are dismissed for ethical or moral issues rather than performance, DeMary said.

"To me, that speaks to a linear evaluation system, one that we are unwilling to devote enough time to really differentiate performance," she said.

Hanover and Chesterfield have few teachers who do not meet teaching expectations. In the 2008-09 school year, about 1 percent of Hanover teachers did not meet expectations, said school spokeswoman Dale Theakston.

"Probationary teachers [those who are in their first three years of teaching] who do not meet expectations are not offered employment or resign," she said. "Tenured teachers are placed on plans of action for the upcoming year with strong expectations for improvement."

Chesterfield dismisses five to 15 teachers a year, most of them beginning teachers, because they don't meet expectations, Evans said.

"That's not many, when you consider 4,100 teachers," he said. "Six, seven years ago, you would find that very few teachers at all were nonrenewed. I think we've come a long way in that end."

Henrico school officials did not want to provide data on teachers who don't meet expectations. Richmond school officials said they were still compiling that data.

Teachers organizations have long opposed tying pay to student performance.

Frank Cardella, president of the Chesterfield Education Association, said he talked to Duncan when Duncan spoke at the National Education Association this summer and made a pitch for performance-based pay.

Cardella, who took a break from teaching to serve as president, said he sees two major problems with merit pay. How would school systems determine teacher performance, and how they would pay for it?

"I think everybody has a different idea of what merit pay is," he said. "What is the metric that is going to be used to determine whether a teacher has been highly effective or not? You simply can't use student scores. If you do, you leave a whole number of variables out of that calculation."

As school systems implement merit pay systems, more teachers likely will receive that money, Cardella said.

"They shouldn't even be having a conversation about what merit pay would look like until there's a revenue stream to support it," he said.

Performance-based pay for teachers has been the subject of debate over the decades, and such states as North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama have programs that reward teachers or schools based on student performance, according to the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board. Other states have abandoned their programs.

Research on performance-based pay has been mixed, showing gains for some schools and no impact for others. Performance-based pay systems have been dismal because teachers do not trust the criteria that are used to represent their performance, DeMary said.

"You've got to be sure that the process you're using to tie to that performance pay is perceived as balanced and fair by people who are affected by it."

Contact Juan Antonio Lizama at (804) 649-6513 or jlizama@timesdispatch.com.