Change the world. Change our schools.

Monday’s Basic Education Finance Task Force meeting focused entirely on alternative pay systems for teachers. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP), the public agency charged by the Legislature with staffing the Task Force, invited half a dozen of the most informed folks from Washington and around the country to address the committee.

No issue is more controversial than the one the Task Force took up Monday: educator compensation reform, in particular schemes to tie compensation to performance, knowledge and skills.   Given the diversity of viewpoints entertained by the Task Force, it was a remarkably focused and informed discussion, one that generated more light than heat.

WSIPP deserves credit for gathering some of the most articulate spokespeople for different points of view around compensation reform.  Check out WSIPP’s excellent 8-page overview of compensation reform schemes from around the country.  

The UW’s Dan Goldhaber, the world’s only sexy, young labor economist, and incidentally an authority on teacher compensation, gave the context for the push for pay for performance.   Roughly speaking, teacher salaries have kept pace with median household income over the last couple of decades, but, compared to other professionals, teachers are falling woefully behind.  The bottom line: teaching is becoming a less and less attractive choice among the brightest young college grads.  While there’s been a lot of experimenting with performance pay around the nation, it’s too soon to know which models work.  He concludes that since the current salary system isn’t working, the Task Force ought to try performance pay.  It’s a case of the devil we know may be worse than the devil we don’t know.

Mary Lindquist, the new president of the Washington Education Association, defended the devil we know.  Before the Task Force considers abandoning the current single salary schedule, members need to recall its virtues:  it’s objective, clear, predictable and fair, all values that resonate with teachers.  The WEA’s preferred approach is to elevate the status of the teaching profession with better pay, more professional respect, better preparation, and time on the job to work collaboratively with colleagues.  We won’t solve the problem of an inadequately funded system by trying to find super-teachers.  Among the guidelines Lindquist proposed for any discussion about performance pay: any new system must be broadly supported by teachers, be open to all, and be based on reliable, sustainable funding.  Tellingly, she said her mother taught in a merit pay school and earned the bonus, but the program was dropped after only a few years because it grew too expensive.

Two folks from Minnesota, a superintendent and a teachers’ union leader, related their personal experience with Minnesota’s QComp, an alternative pay system that has been getting favorable national attention.  The superintendent was about as enthusiastic as a Minnesotan can get.  In his suburban school district with high concentrations of low-income kids, QComp “changed the conversation.”  Teachers were more focused on student achievement, more involved in goal setting with their principals, and more engaged in their own professional development.  Test scores improved.  The union leader, from a smaller, rural district, was equally positive.  Initially 58 percent of his teachers approved QComp (teachers have to vote to implement the program); now approval is up in the mid-70’s.   Visit the Task Force’s webpage for details about how QComp works.

A former teacher and foundation officer from Denver related lessons learned from Denver’s adoption of its ProComp plan, which is funded by a voter-approved mill levy.  His pitch was less a commercial for the Denver model, and more a pep talk that performance pay, while controversial, can be done: “You can beat the politics of teacher pay incentives.”  He outlined some of the steps required:  engage the unions, secure a permanent funding source, and invest in communicating the plan.  Above all, he said, don’t succumb to the usual myths surrounding performance pay, especially the myth that “unions won’t collaborate.” 

Finally, another former teacher from Wisconsin, this one turned policy wonk, presented his analyses of teacher compensation pay schemes from a union perspective.   Like Professor Goldhaber, he finds there is very little evidence pro or con about their effectiveness.  He argues systems that turn on individual evaluation will founder over the cultural issue of favoritism. He favors rewarding teachers based on skills and knowledge.

So the one theme linking every presentation?  Any successful performance pay plan must engage educators and their unions in its design and implementation.  I’ll give the last word to the most unabashed supporter of pay incentives, the former teacher from Denver:  “Never underestimate the power of treating teachers well.”

Last week I attended a two-day conference in Nashville, TN on teacher pay at Vanderbilt University. Day one started at 7 a.m. and ended about 15 hours later. The information was dense and overrun with formulas and cohort talk. Having said that, I left the conference with two simple yet overwhelmingly clear conclusions:

First, this conversation requires collaboration.

More often than not, the debate in the room was a little top-down and too removed from reality. The room seemed to be 70% economists and another 20% psychometrists. I was part of a grand team of four advocates that I counted (out of roughly 500 attendees). In addition, the union voice felt dangerously low to nonexistent. Sure, there were two union members who were panelists and NYC’s UFT President Randi Weingarten delivered the keynote address (she did a great job by the way). However, considering the importance of the topic and potential effects on the teaching profession, it felt pretty unbalanced.

This is more than a little ironic considering that the most successful pay for performance plans involved intense local collaboration from the get-go. Minnesota’s Q-Comp is a voluntary program that districts can adopt after a local plan is developed by a team that includes teachers, union representatives, and other leaders. Oregon’s Class Project has modeled many elements of Q-Comp in their demonstration sites. While these projects are new and data is next to nonexistent, intense local collaboration is leading to positive changes in local culture.  Education leaders have come together and are working on solutions to improve support for teachers and results for children.

Second, change is necessary.

In many ways, I was the perfect focus group for this conference. I’m an advocate and I’ve studied data enough to know where the problems are. However, I’m not an academic and know relatively little about pay for performance programs across the country.  Whether the research discussed a specific program or market supply economics - the research overwhelmingly revealed that the statewide pay scale exclusively based on seniority is outdated for several reasons.

First, it doesn’t recognize the fact that times have changed and college graduates today can expect to have three to five career changes in their lifetime. The current system is too inflexible and turns off potential applicants. Second, uniformly paying teachers based on seniority has led to dangerous economic effects by creating teacher shortages in subject and geographic areas. In addition, more experienced and effective teachers tend to move to districts with less challenging populations. Finally, the starting point is too low. How can we expect to attract the highest quality graduate with such a low starting salary? It just won’t happen. If we’re serious about raising student achievement, we need to get serious about treating teachers with the professionalism that they deserve.

Research increasingly shows that the teacher is the most important element in a child’s educational progress. Kati Haycock of Education Trust reminds us that students who have two years of ineffective instruction in a row never catch up. This is a lose-lose-lose situation - teachers lose, students lose, society loses. Teachers need support in terms of compensation and professional development opportunities that lead to results in the classroom.  They also need better tools so they know how their students are doing and can ensure that every student makes at least one year of academic growth within one year of instruction. It is only by working together that we can develop a solution where teachers and students win, not to mention society, our economy … the list goes on.

Conference information (including papers) can be viewed here: http://performanceincentives.org/conference/