Cautionary tales on performance pay

WENDY CURRIE outlines the realities of performance pay.

In some states of the United States, performance pay based on student achievement on standardised tests is moving in a direction that was clearly unforeseen by its advocates.

In Houston, $14 million was distributed as staff bonuses, including cash bonuses of between $100 and more than $7000, based purely on students' performances on standardised tests. The better the students performed the bigger the bonus received. Many teachers of course received nothing.

As if that was not enough, the school district published the names of the teachers who gained the bonuses in order. There was an uproar. Interestingly enough some of the uproar came from schools and parents demanding to know why teachers they believed to be excellent teachers were not awarded a bonus. There were even teachers on "growth plans", their version of efficiency programs, who gained a bonus, while teachers who have received a range of excellence in teaching awards did not get the bonus.

And the bonuses were only available to teachers of those subjects for which there is a standardised test.

But the sting in the tail is that parents are now demanding that their children be placed in the classes of those teachers who were awarded a bonus, preferably those who got the biggest bonuses and whose names appear at the top of the list.

This is causing havoc in schools, as there can't be classes with a 100 students and others with none.

To top it all off, the superintendent of the school district, which has 290,000 students, made the mistake of publicly saying that these teachers were "the cream of the crop". As you can imagine this has done nothing for morale and does not improve outcomes one jot.

Houston's board of education is now looking to change the plan.

In Florida, where a similar performance pay regime was instituted, the school authorities are nervous about publishing the names of teachers given the bonuses because of the experience in Houston, but there is a view that Florida's public records laws will mean that they will have to be published.

Believe it or not, a lawyer for one of the Florida school districts has said that, while teacher evaluations are protected from publication, awarding of bonuses is not an evaluation, but merely "data" so the list should be published.

Wendy Currie is a Research Officer. This article is based on media articles distributed through website Education Week (www.edweek.org).

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