Teachers question practicality of ‘pay for performance’

Shanda Hickman has spent nearly a decade of her life attaining higher education, which she was told would advance her career.

If Gov. Sonny Perdue’s pre-K-12 teacher pay reform bill passes, the Eastbrook Middle School gifted teacher believes there will be an end to the current emphasis on attaining advanced degrees. She has a bachelor’s, a master’s, a specialist and a doctorate and is nationally certified.

“I'm not going to sit here and say (the governor’s proposal is) going to be all bad or all good,” Hickman said, “but I am going to say that before I'm going to sign off on it being something that I could support, I need to see what will be proposed and how it will be implemented.”

Perdue’s proposal to base half of a teacher’s evaluation on how well the teacher’s students grow academically during the past year — and to base their pay at least partly on that evaluation — has drawn criticism from several teacher groups as well as individual educators. The other half of a teacher’s evaluation would come from reviews from peer teachers and administrators.

The current pay scale gives automatic raises for teachers based on their level of education and their number of years teaching. Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley likened the pay systems to the difference between a football team being awarded a win for how hard they practiced and prepared vs. gaining a victory by scoring the most points in the game.

“There’s mixed evidence that an advanced degree actually leads to improvements in student achievement,” Brantley said.

A 2008 report from the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, the organization that certifies teachers, shows that of 119,000 teachers in the state, all but about 49,000 had advanced degrees. Some 52,700 had a master’s degree, nearly 16,000 had a specialist and about 1,700 had a doctorate.

Pay for performance is a component of Georgia’s Race to the Top application, an attempt to receive up to $463 million in federal grants over four years.

Brantley said the governor’s office will work with the state Department of Education and 23 Georgia school districts (none are local) to develop details of the pay plan. A bill to begin research and implement the changes by 2014 is expected to be submitted to the Legislature within the next couple of weeks.

All new teachers would fall under the merit pay system if the program is put in place for 2014, but teachers already in the system would have a choice. They could stay on the current pay scale or opt in to the new one.

Educators would start out at a certain base pay and be eligible for “certain levels of performance pay,” Brantley said.

He said educators and developers hope to place teachers from low-performing schools and teachers from high-performing schools in separate cohorts. In that scenario, teacher evaluation criteria could be different depending on where the teacher works.

“That ... (way), you’re not judging historically low performing schools’ teachers against the high performing schools in the state,” he said.

In a survey the governor’s office conducted of 20,507 teachers in December, some 47 percent agreed “increases in salary should be driven by teacher effectiveness.”

Hickman said there could be concerns on the other side. If bright students have fewer improvements to make, will there be a financial incentive to teach them?

“To be honest, there will probably be more incentive to teach in schools that have historically not had students that may not have achieved as well as others and where you have a lot more room for growth,” Brantley said, “and where you have a lot more — hopefully — ability to drive achievement and the increase in achievement.”

If the plan passes, Hickman’s son Matthew, a fifth-year math teacher at Southeast High School, said he’ll work on earning another degree before it goes into effect. Earning advanced degrees could be cost prohibitive for many teachers if they aren’t guaranteed compensation, said the master’s degree holder.

Measuring a teacher’s performance by his or her students’ performance is difficult to quantify at best, he said.

“You can give a test, and a teacher can teach to that test, but then what a student has learned is how to take that test,” he said.

Brantley said he doesn’t know which tests or whether a combination of factors will be used to measure teacher effectiveness. If the program were starting tomorrow, the evaluation instrument would likely be the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), Brantley said, but a national assessment could be in place by 2014.

The CRCT is designed to determine how well students know the material for their grade level. Teachers say it doesn’t show year-to-year growth.

One issue that hasn’t been addressed is how “non-core teachers,” those who teach extracurricular subjects for which there is no standards-based test like the CRCT, will be evaluated. Brantley said researchers will look into several options and will involve non-core teachers in making those decisions.

Barbara Shields, a kindergarten paraprofessional at Cohutta Elementary School, said teacher pay changes affect support staff. For example, state officials furloughed certified personnel like teachers and administrators this school year, but support staff such as parapros were also furloughed.

She said the combination of furloughs, state funding cuts and now the possibility of a new pay system has demoralized some educators. A group from North Georgia was set to visit the capitol on Saturday to voice their opposition to more education funding cuts.

“Talking to the teachers at my school, everybody is just worried about whether it’s going to be worth staying in education because they can’t support their families,” Shields said.

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Teachers question practicality of ‘pay for performance’

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