Lawmakers link teacher bonuses with student test scores

A new mandate to reward Florida teachers for their students’ test scores is generating heat as details of the plan are unveiled.

Saying high-performing teachers should be rewarded, Republican lawmakers settled on a plan that would tie educators’ pay to how much progress their students made on standardized tests. While the law suspended an extremely controversial rule imposed by the state board of education earlier this year, school districts are facing a logistical headache in coming up with a plan that is likely to be unpopular with teachers.

The new rules require that districts pay out bonuses to at least a quarter of all teachers. In Lee County, that would be about 1,300 teachers. And the extra money must represent at least 5 percent of one’s base salary. For a teacher earning the average $40,000 annually, that would amount to $2,000.

The state Legislature directed $147.5 million toward the effort, of which Lee County will get $4.4 million, to be paid out at the end of the 2006-07 school year.

The state anticipates it will need more than 30,000 new teachers next year to accommodate growth and class-size limits, and in high-growth Lee County the demand is even stronger.

The chance to earn a few thousand dollars extra, advocates say, could be a huge incentive. But with Florida’s teacher pay about $6,000 short of the national average, opponents say higher salaries across the board would be a better way to recruit and retain teachers.

Donna Mutzenard, president of the Teachers Association of Lee County, said the union is not happy about the idea, but it will work with the Lee County School District to formulate a plan. Whatever they create will have to be approved by the Department of Education. Payouts likely will come sometime in June 2007 after scores from the spring’s Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test are out.

“I would love to put that $4.4 million in the salary schedule (instead),” Mutzenard said.

The amount would give teachers in Lee a 2 percent across-the-board raise, she said.

Still, the new plan is a bit more flexible than the initial one imposed earlier this year by the state board of education.

Lawmakers passed the state’s original performance pay law in 2001, allowing counties to create their own rules about who could get the bonuses. Earlier this year, the board voted on a new way to enforce the law by rewarding the top 10 percent of teachers statewide, saying the reaction was a crackdown on districts’ noncompliance with the law.

TALC, backed by the state teachers’ union, sued the Florida Department of Education earlier in the year after the new rules were announced. The suit argued that Lee County’s plan already was following the state law, and it was in part based on learning gains.

Last year, the district gave out $500,000 in merit-based pay to 160 teachers.

Now, the STAR (Special Teachers Are Rewarded) program will replace all that. It still requires individual districts to come up with their own plan but has stringent requirements. At least 50 percent of the evaluation must be tied to improved student achievement. According to a memo sent June 13 from Education Commissioner John Winn, it must pay out the bonuses to both administrators and teachers, as well as base a portion of every teacher’s pay on performance.

The catch is this: Districts can’t require an application for the bonus; all teachers must be considered for it. That might sound simple for reading, math or science teachers, whose students take the standardized FCAT Test. But how will they go about quantifying the work of art teachers, guidance counselors, librarians?

It’s up to the school district to figure out a system for measuring the “achievement of individual students” in non-core subjects.

“That’s going to be our biggest task. Right now we have the application process and people choose their own plan. With this, you can’t have applications, so I don’t know how we do it,” Mutzenard said.

Florida isn’t the only performance-pay battleground. Measures to tie teacher bonuses to student achievement have been discussed or are in effect in dozens of states in all parts of the country. According to Quality Counts 2006, a yearly report from the industry magazine Education Week, only three states currently have a bonus system tied to student performance on standardized tests: Florida, North Carolina and Oklahoma. The Houston Independent School District in January also approved a plan to base teacher bonuses on test scores, and the state of Texas is following suit. And in Massachusetts, as in many other states, Gov. Mitt Romney wants to give teachers bonuses as high as $15,000 based on test scores as well as classroom evaluations.

Local experts say merit pay must be thought out thoroughly. Patricia Wachholz, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, said she’s not sure the current plan will recruit or retain any of the teachers Florida so desperately needs.

What states should be doing, Wachholz said, is making sure students who need the most help are getting the most experienced, high-performing teachers.

“I don’t object to the FCAT, but I think the way we use it is subverting its intention,” she said. “We want children to be able to read, we want them to be able to write and do some numbers. We also want them to be good citizens, appreciate the environment and the fine arts. I’m disturbed by how we’re using this test and calling it a comprehensive assessment.”