Reforming the teaching profession, part 2: Pay-for-performance

Like tenure reform, discussed in yesterday's post, tying teacher salaries to student outcomes is a controversial education reform strategy that is gaining traction across the country, but has yet to be debated in Milwaukee. Many of the recent efforts come from the federal Race to the Top grant guidelines, which expressed a preference for states that included student outcomes as a factor in teacher evaluations.

But even before Race to the Top, several districts already had implemented merit pay plans, most notably the Denver Public Schools. The DPS scheme, call ProComp, was approved by Denver voters in 2005. Teachers new to the district are automatically part of the program and other teachers may opt-in. In exchange for a higher base salary, teachers agree to accept pay raises based on participation in professional development activities, working in a hard-to-staff school, showing proficiency in teacher evaluations, and/or exceeding student achievement goals. The goals of ProComp are to improve student outcomes and to attract and retain quality teachers.

A recent evaluation of ProComp found that the program appears to have contributed to the district's gains in reading and math scores and to have attracted new teachers with better student outcomes in their first year of teaching.

Other programs have shown less promise. An evaluation of a state program in Texas that provided grants to high poverty schools to implement merit-based bonuses found that over the three years of the program, schools that gave bigger bonuses had less teacher turnover; however, no relationship between the merit bonuses and student outcomes was found.

Despite the mixed results of these and other pay-for-performance strategies, federal, state, and district officials continue to seek ways to connect teacher pay to student achievement. In two districts, controversial new superintendents have received approval to implement merit pay plans starting next school year. Michelle Rhee and the Washington D.C. plan were discussed in a previous post. A superintendent that has often been compared to Rhee, Mike Miles, will implement a plan in the Harrison School District of Colorado Springs in which all teachers and principals in the 11,000-student district will forgo salary step increases in favor of raises based on performance.

The Harrison plan stands out among merit pay schemes in its reliance on classroom observations to measure teacher effectiveness. Soon after joining the district in 2006, Miles started intensive professional development for principals in the art of classroom observations. In addition, he established an extensive professional development infrastructure so that principals can refer teachers to training opportunities based on what was observed. Principals are to conduct frequent "spot" observations of 10 to 15 minutes, as well as longer formal observations of entire lessons and/or classes, and give constructive feedback to teachers.

The observation scores will be matched to student performance scores on, at minimum, the state standardized test, progress-monitoring and interim assessments, and district assessments. Together, the observations and student performance scores will place the teacher in one of nine salary tiers. Teachers can move down the tiers, as well as up, and their salaries will be adjusted accordingly. For current teachers, the adjustments will be made from their current salary.

This new merit pay model, which requires not only investment in salaries and raises, but also substantial resources for professional development, is certain to be closely watched across the country as it moves forward. Will Milwaukee's new superintendent be watching as well?

Reforming the teaching profession, part 1: Tenure reform

Milwaukee is often called ground zero for education reform, and for good reason. We have been on the forefront of reforms such as budget decentralization, school-to-work, neighborhood schools, parental choice, charter schools and, the most recent attempt, governance reform.

There are two hot-button issues, however, that have not been on the agenda here: merit pay and tenure reform. But, with both of these tactics garnering more attention across the country, it seems unlikely Milwaukee will be a hold-out for long.

Merit pay, or pay-for-performance, has been implemented or is in the process of being implemented in several schools districts across the state. Tomorrow I'll post about a few of those efforts. Today's post focuses on tenure reform.

In one way, tenure reform has gained a foothold in Milwaukee. The recently passed legislation that gives the state Department of Public Instruction with greater powers over the Milwaukee Public Schools also eliminated tenure for principals in MPS. (MPS is the only district in the state with represented principals.) But it does not tackle teacher tenure, or permanent status, head-on.

Teacher tenure laws arose in the 1920s and '30s from the women's rights movement of the time. In an era in which female teachers were routinely fired for getting married or wearing pants, teachers needed protection from paternalistic employment laws, unfair rules, and arbitrary decisions by administrators. Today, through due process requirements, tenure still protects teachers from arbitrary dismissal, and also provides some protection from political, ideological, or other pressures from administrators, school boards, or parents. An argument also can be made that tenure helps balance out the limitations of the job, such as a low salary, and makes the profession more attractive.

Providing permanent status to teachers has both fiscal and educational drawbacks. From a fiscal perspective, dismissing a teacher is a long and costly process for school districts and districts. And from an educational standpoint, districts often struggle to hold mediocre teachers with tenure accountable for student performance. In addition, some argue that K-12 teachers are not in need of the same "academic freedoms" as professors and that there is not the same threat today of unfair working conditions or arbitrary dismissals.

Over the past year many states have begun debating tenure reform proposals. In fact, at least four states have had tenure reform bills introduced this spring that would bring teacher quality into the tenure/dismissal decision:

• Colorado: Last week Governor Ritter signed a "teacher effectiveness bill" into law that, among other things, grants tenure only after a teacher has three consecutive years of "demonstrated effectiveness" in the classroom. Tenured teachers lose their non-probationary status if they have two consecutive years of unsatisfactory evaluations. In addition, when layoffs are necessary, effectiveness will be considered before seniority.


• Louisiana: Gov. Jindal's proposal to tie dismissal decisions to annual performance evaluations has passed the Louisiana House and is awaiting a vote in the Senate. The bill specifies that the evaluations will include consideration of student performance. In addition, teachers deemed ineffective would receive "intensive assistance" for a year. Those judged ineffective a second time could be dismissed.


• California: Gov. Schwartzenegger's 2005 proposal to increase the probationary period for teachers from two to five years was defeated by the voters. He is now supporting a reform that would prevent layoff decisions from being made based solely on seniority. In addition, the Los Angeles Unified School district is planning to dismiss three times more teachers this year than last year, after the Los Angeles Times reported that an investigation of the district revealed no systematic process for evaluating teacher performance prior to granting permanent status.


• Florida: Gov. Crist vetoed a bill last month that would have eliminated teacher tenure and linked salaries to student performance. The bill kept tenure in place for current teachers, but tied their pay to performance evaluations. New teachers would have worked under one-year contracts and would have been dismissed for low student performance on end-of-year exams in any two of five years.

Other states also have debated or changed their laws regarding the number of years a teacher works before being eligible for tenure, including Ohio, Maryland, and Delaware.

Interestingly, Wisconsin is the only state in which districts are not statutorily required to provide tenure for teachers, although all districts currently do so. At first blush, it might seem that this unique status would allow MPS to more easily embark on an evaluation of the tenure process, potentially making changes of the type being debated nationally. In reality, however, the district is unlikely to seek any changes in teacher contracts that would make employment at MPS less attractive than in surrounding districts.

Will a district and a city accustomed to being at the cutting edge of education reform sit out this latest wave of reform efforts? The clock is ticking on when tenure reform will become part of the discussion about the urgent need to improve student outcomes in Milwaukee.

Part II, tomorrow: One superintendent's role in tying teacher pay to student achievement.

MPS labor relations and the new superintendent

Over the past few days, four former MPS superintendents have met in two public forums to share the lessons they have learned about running the state's largest school district. In both forums a recurring theme was Howard Fuller's contention that: "I was in charge, but I wasn't in control."

His meaning, with which the other former superintendents generally agreed, was that the labor contracts with the teachers and principals unions constrained his ability to make dramatic changes in the district. The implication was that the district's new superintendent, Gregory Thornton, would find it similarly difficult to improve outcomes under the current labor-management dynamic.

Whether this perception is accurate or not with regard to MPS, a new, still tentative, labor agreement in the Washington D.C. school district provides an example of a superintendent turning labor negotiating on its head. The D.C. superintendent, Michelle Rhee, has received much national press over the past two years as she pushed for a new paradigm of how, and how much, teachers are paid in D.C.

Her original idea was to phase out tenure and the traditional salary step-increases by phasing in a new system that would determine salary increases by performance and would have teachers give up tenure for a year. In exchange for the uncertainty that would bring teachers as they planned their futures, she proposed to nearly double the base salary.

While the apparent end-point of the D.C. negotiations bears little resemblance to that starting point, the new contract does reflect some remarkable changes to the relationship between the district and its teachers. For example:

• Teachers who qualify can opt to link their pay to performance. How their performance will be measured is yet to be determined, but the current language says it will not be limited to just student test scores.


• The district will be able to adjust the size of its workforce through school closings or district-wide layoffs. Teachers who are affected by these workforce reductions, and who perform well under the evaluation system, could be eligible for either a $25,000 severance payment, retirement with full benefits (for those teachers with more than 20 years in the district), or a salaried year of placement services to help find a job elsewhere.


• Base salaries increase by 20% over the five years of the contract (retroactive to October 2007); however, the higher price tag will not pinch taxpayers for now. Almost $65 million in private donations from the Broad Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation will cover the costs of the increased base salaries, as well as the performance pay.

Neither the superintendent nor the union got all they wanted nor gave up as much as was asked of them, and some issues remain unresolved, including who will cover the costs once the grant funds run out in 2012. But the D.C. experience shows that determined leadership by a superintendent can bring new issues to the bargaining table. D.C.'s two years of very public and very contentious negotiations also show, however, that the process is likely to be quite slow and painful.

The debate in Milwaukee has lately focused on mayoral control and the powers of the state superintendent of public instruction, but this week's forums raise the possibility that the issue most likely to affect the new MPS superintendent's ability to implement a reform agenda will be his relationship with the teachers and principals unions. Will Gregory Thornton make waves or smooth out wrinkles?

Public or private, school is boring

A new study in Science finds that schoolchildren in the US have only a 1-in-14 chance of experiencing a rich, supportive elementary classroom.

Researchers went to 2,500 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-grade classrooms, tracking cohorts of students as they progressed through the school, to observe teachers and the typical day experienced by students.

Some of the findings:

• Fifth-graders spent 91.2% of class time in their seats listening to a teacher or working alone, and only 7% working in small groups, which fosters social skills and critical thinking. Findings were similar in 1st and 3rd
  grades.

• In 5th grade, 62% of instructional time was in literacy or math; only 24% was devoted to social studies or science.

• About one in seven (14%) kids had a consistently high-quality "instructional climate" all three years studied. Most classrooms had a fairly healthy "emotional climate," but only 7% of students consistently had classrooms high in both.
  

My first thought was whether the researchers visited both public and private schools. The USA Today article about the study (Science is available online only to subscribers) mentions that there were no differences between public and private schools. Could that be true? There is not any measure on which the classroom experiences in public schools differ significantly from those in private schools? This finding will certainly shock proponents of market-based education reform (i.e. private school vouchers). But it doesn't shock me. I've visited public and private schools in Milwaukee for eight years as a researcher at the Forum and found that the variety of quality in both public and private schools is extraordinary. So, I'm not surprised that when all that variety is averaged out, there aren't big differences between the public and private schools.

Interestingly, this finding is bound to be equally irksome for public school advocates like the teachers' unions. Not only are their members not doing enough to stimulate their students' brains, they can't even blame it on the pressure of working under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requirements. If NCLB were really to blame for this lack of richness in the classroom, you would expect to find some differences when observing in private schools, which are not subject to NCLB.

So, from my read, the findings mean that you aren't guaranteed an engaging and supportive teacher just because you're in a private school, and federal testing requirements aren't the root cause of lackluster creativity in the classroom. Teaching is hard to do well, period. If you're a parent, the lesson you should take from this is to visit your own children's classrooms frequently. If your kids aren't getting the higher-order problem solving skills, or the support, or the enrichment they need, you'll know it.