Pay+for+Performance

Pay-for-Performance for Teachers

Traditionally, teachers nationwide are paid using a salary schedule that is based on teaching experience and education level. For instance, in Muscogee County, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no teaching experience will be paid $36,311 a year. That same teacher will be paid $37,328 a year once she reaches 3 years of experience, assuming that this teacher does not earn another degree in this time. If this teacher completes her Master’s degree at the time that she begins her third year of teaching, her annual salary will increase to $42,563. Technically, as long as a teacher is consistent and does nothing that warrants a dismissal, she will continue to receive a pay increase every year or two years.
 * Pay-for-Performance Overview **

// The following link provides the salary schedule for the Muscogee County School District. //

Pay-for-Performance is a hot topic in education today and has been for some time now. Heneman, Minaowski, and Kimball (2007) define a performance pay plan as “any systematic process for measuring teacher behavior or results, and linking these measurements to changes in teacher pay” (Jensen, Yamashiro, & Tibbetts, 2010). “Education Secretary Arne Duncan says performance pay for teachers is his department’s “highest priority.” The Obama Administration created the $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund to encourage states to implement performance pay systems and other changes” (Rosales, year?). "The US Department of Education asked states to include proposals for implementing teacher merit pay in their 2010 applications for Race to the Top monies, and many applicants promised action on this front" (Buck & Greene, 2011, pg. 27).
 * What is pay-for-performance? **

The desire to improve student achievement has pushed stakeholders to push for pay-for-performance for teachers. Jensen, Yamashiro, and Tibbetts (2010) suggest that there are certain factors that are driving this change in teacher compensation:
 * Why is pay-for-performance necessary? **
 * It is perceived that there is a lack of quality in teachers and that performance pay could improve teacher quality.
 * Teacher recuitment is suffering because many quality teachers are pursuing higher paying careers.
 * Teacher attrition is on a rise because of many factors in education such as low pay, higher demands, and little respect from society.

The Hanover Research shares in Pay-for-Performance Models for Teachers and Administrators that “the structural elements of a performance-based pay system are:
 * What are the structural elements of a performance-based pay system? **
 * 1) Unit of Accountability: Determine whose performance is to be measured: individual, group, or a hybrid of the two models.
 * 2) Measures of Performance: Determine what input and output measures are used to evaluate performance.
 * 3) Incentive Eligibility: Determine both the scope of eligible staff as well as percentage of those eligible staff who may receive performance increases in a given year.”

The common types of performance pay plans, as described by Jensen, Yamashiro, and Tibbetts (2010), can be found below.
 * What are the common types of performance pay plans? **
 * Knowledge- and skill-based pay
 * Base-pay increase or bonus for demonstrating skill/competency
 * Revised salary schedule with performance-linked career ladder progression
 * Individual-based performance pay
 * Also known as merit pay
 * Individually based performance indicators
 * Teachers compete for bonuses
 * May modify single salary schedule
 * School-based performance pay
 * School-level plan with school-wide performance indicator goals
 * Keep single salary schedule but add bonuses
 * Combined Plan
 * Could include individual/skill-based and school-level performance measure
 * Additional pay on top of salary for meeting skill, evaluation, student achievement requirements
 * Single salary schedule replaced

The idea that people react to incentives drives this concept of performance pay. If teachers are rewarded for a job well done, then that would improve their performance, right? Pay-for-Performance is an issue within education.
 * Pay-for-Performance: Trend or Issue? **

Pay-for-performance plans vary from plan to plan. Plans may reward individuals, a team of individuals, and entire school or a combination of those previously mentioned. Rewards for teachers may be based on a single standardized test or a series of criteria that must be met. As mentioned earlier, the four common types of performance pay plans are knowledge- and skill-based pay, individual-based performance pay, school-based performance pay, and combined plan. For each type of plan, there are benefits and drawbacks. (The following information provided has been taken from “What Do We Know About Teacher Pay-for-Performance?” by Jensen, Yamashiro, and Tibbetts.)
 * What's the big issue? **

__ Knowledge- and skill-based pay __ Knowledge- and skill-based pay encourages professional development, education, and the acquisition of new skills. Through this plan, the needs of the school will be aligned with the professional development and skills sought by educators. Through this plan, educators are rewarded individually.

//Benefits//:
 * Motivates educators to acquire new skills

//Drawbacks//:
 * Difficult for teachers to understand skill requirements, the pay structure, and system procedures
 * Administrators are excluded from being similarly accountable

__ Individual-based performance pay __ Individual-based performance pay, also known as merit pay, assesses individual teachers based on evaluations, student test scores, etc.

//Benefits//: //Drawbacks//:
 * Encourages teachers to continue development even after reaching their top salary.
 * Student test scores and teacher evaluations can be considered biased and unreliable.
 * Encourages competition between teachers and discourages teamwork and collaboration amongst teachers.
 * Difficult to measure one individual’s impact on a single student’s success.

__ School-based performance pay __ This plan rewards interdependent groups on reaching organizational goals. The interdependent group may be a team of teacher or the entire school faculty.

//Benefits//:
 * Encourages teamwork and collaboration among teachers.

//Drawbacks//:
 * Potential for one teacher to “ride on the coattail” of other teachers
 * Does not give incentive for individual to achieve.

__ Combined plan __ The combined plan could include approaches from all of the other performance pay plans.

//Benefits//:
 * Flexible in providing multiple approaches to improving teacher and student performance.

//Drawbacks//:
 * Creates issues with system alignment, fairness, and trust.

There are many different ways that school districts can implement pay-for-performance plans to improve teacher performance and ultimately improve student performance. Unfortunately, there is not much research available that proves or refutes the idea that paying teachers for their performance will improve student performance. However, in 2011, there were 500 school districts in the nation out of 14,000 districts that were implementing performance pay plans (Buck & Greene, 2011).

As school systems attempt to implement pay-for-performance programs, they are often blocked by teacher unions or watered down so much that they have lost their original intent. “Some locales have diluted the merit pay concept by making the bonuses to teachers small and setting the bar for receiving the bonuses low, thereby converting [pay-for-performance] into something approximately an across-the-board pay raise” (Buck & Greene, 2011, pg. 30). Pay-for-performance has been an issue in the world of education for some time now, and continues to be because teachers and teacher unions typically oppose performance pay. Below you will find examples of performance pay plans that have been blocked or modified by stakeholders:
 * Implementing Performance Pay Plans: Easier said than done **
 * In 2010, "the Florida legislature enacted one of the more stringent proposals any state has ever attempted-only to have the bill vetoed by Governor Charlie Crist as a way of jump-starting his ultimately doomed bid to become Florida's first independent U.S. senator" (Buck & Greene, 2011, pg. 27)
 * "Governor Mitt Romney proposed merit pay in Massachusetts back in 2005-06, as part of an education budget that included tens of millions in new spending. That proposal went down to defeat; as the Lowell Sun reported, 'the Massachusetts Teachers Association and United Teachers of Lowell opposed the idea...'" (Buck & Greene, 2011, pg. 28).
 * "In Alabama, the state's "Race to the Top" application originally proposed merit pay and a 'new salary schedule that would give more money to math, science and special education teachers,' but that portion of the application was deleted, reported the Press-Register (Mobile), 'after Alabama Education Association leader Paul Hubbert wrote state Superintendent Joe Morton a letter...opposing them'" (Buck & Greene, 2011, pg. 28).

The following quote was taken from an article titled There's Talk of Merit Pay for Teachers Through Race to the Top Program: "Georgia Teacher of the Year for 2011 Pam Williams said she understands merit pay proposals 'make many teachers nervous,' but she said that there are some advantages to implementing a merit pay system. 'I think teachers do want to know that everyone is being held to some measure of accountability,' Williams said at the media symposium, held at Georgia Public Television in Atlanta. 'We want to know that everyone is working hard,' Williams said. 'I think this will level the playing field.' Will merit pay make a classroom teacher's job even more difficult? 'Not if you do your job,' she said (Bishop, 2011).
 * Popular Opinion **

The following quote was taken from an article titled 'Pay for Performance' Pitfalls: "Last week, 35 public school teachers and administrators indicted for allegedly cheating to raise test scores in an Atlanta school district began turning themselves in to authorities...Were these teachers and principals all 'bad apples,' intrinsically unethical individuals who somehow ended up in the same school district? Not likely. They were ordinary people who allegedly did unethical and dishonest things to achieve the student performance targets needed to keep their jobs and earn their bonuses. The Atlanta cheating scandal illustrates the dangers of the modern infatuation with incentives and what's called 'pay for performance'" (Stout, 2013).


 * Annotated Bibliography **

This article discusses merit pay and the Race to the Top grant.
 * Bishop, J. (2011). There's talk of merit pay for teachers through race to the top program. The Newnan Times-Herald. Retreived from **
 * [] **

This article discusses merit pay and how interest groups block, dilute, or co-opt merit pay plans before they can go into effect.
 * Buck, S., & Greene, J. P. (2011). Blocked, Diluted, and Co-Opted: Interest Groups Wage War against Merit Pay. Education Next, 11(2), 26-31. **

This article discusses using value-added assessments to determine pay for teachers that is based on student learning.
 * Caillier, J. (2010). Paying Teachers According to Student Achievement: Questions regarding Pay-for-Performance Models in Public Education. Clearing House: A Journal Of Educational Strategies, Issues And Ideas, 83(2), 58-61. **

This article debates the question of whether student learning is improved by whole-school performance pay.
 * Goodman, S., & Turner, L. (2011). Does Whole-School Performance Pay Improve Student Learning? Evidence from the New York City Schools. Education Next, 11(2), 67-71. **

This article discusses different pay-for performance models for teachers and administrators and the three aspects of the pay-for-performance concept in education.
 * Hanover Research. (2012) Pay-for-Performance Models for Teachers and Administrators. Retrieved from **
 * [] **

This article discusses what was known about pay-for-performance for teachers at the time that the article was written in 2010.
 * Jensen, U, G. Yamashiro and K. Tibbetts. 2010. What Do We Know about Teacher Pay-for-Performance? Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools. Retrieved from [] **

This article discusses the pitfalls and drawbacks of pay-for-performance.
 * Stout, L. (2013). 'Pay for performance' pitfalls. The Los Angeles Times. Retreived from **
 * [] **

This article discusses the questions that arise when discussing the performance pay reform.
 * Tienken, C. H. (2011). Pay for Performance: Whose Performance?. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 47(4), 152-154. **

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