The vice president of the California Teachers Association said last week that he wouldn’t oppose alternative pay plans for teachers, under two conditions: They must be negotiated locally, and they must not tie teacher raises to results on California’s annual, high-stakes standardized tests.

Dean Vogel was a panelist on a forum on pay for performance sponsored by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. The other panelists, who included a high school principal, a superintendent, an executive at a Silicon Valley corporation and a leader at a philanthropic organization who has studied the issue extensively, agreed it was time to pursue new ways to reward teacher excellence and leadership.

Panelists at the Silicon Valley Education Foundation forum, from left: Jeff Camp, Thomas Erzin, Marc Liebman, Jim Russell, Dean Vogel

“I’m amazed at the level of commitment teachers have, given a compensation system that doesn’t encourage it,” said Jim Russell, principal of Delmar High School in San Jose. The current pay system, with its “feeling of entitlement,” fosters complacency that takes away drive to do things differently, he said.

The California Teachers Association discouraged local chapters from signing agreements to participate in the Race to the Top competition, which required that teachers agree to use test data as a basis for evaluations and compensation. But Vogel said that was because the implications for teacher contracts were unclear from the state’s application.

Separate from that competition, the federal Department of Education is offering $600 million in grants this year through the Teacher Incentive Fund to create new evaluation and compensation systems for teachers and principals. Vogel implied that CTA leaders wouldn’t discourage local unions from joining their districts in pursuing the money.

No relationship of pay to achievement

Teachers are currently paid based on years of experience and academic degrees they received. It’s a simple and a predictable system, but it doesn’t distinguish between teachers who are excellent performers and those who aren’t, and there’s no direct correlation between years of teachers’ experience and degrees they hold and student performance.

Contrary to perceptions, the Obama administration isn’t requiring that test scores be the sole or primary factor in granting pay raises. Local districts would decide, as part of negotiations, how much weight to give test scores.

The panelists at the forum agreed with Vogel that there would be problems using the California Standards Tests as a basis for pay raises: Not all subjects and grades are tested; they are given in spring, but results aren’t back until the fall. Many high school students don’t’ take them seriously. They can be a poor gauge of progress of advanced students, and they’d be problematic in low-income schools with high mobility rates of students.

The panelists generally agreed there should be multiple measures of student progress, including lower stakes “formative assessments” that students would take over the course of a year.

Berryessa Union School District Superintendent Marc Leibman warned that creating a competitive pay system would break down collaboration among teachers that is vital to a successful school. But Thomas Ezrin, vice president for global compensation at the electronics component manufacturer Flextronics, said that the ability to collaborate is one of the measures that the company considers in deciding compensation. Other factors are leadership, commitment to continuous improvement and disciplined execution – traits and values that should be adapted to evaluating and paying teachers and principals, he said.

New system is doable

Russell expressed confidence that a fair compensation system, using a matrix of factors, could be created, while acknowledging that principals would be stretched to effectively evaluate all teachers every year. (That’s why many of the proposed evaluation systems include peer reviews by teachers as well.)

Vogel said the pressure for new pay systems is coming from Washington, and carries the assumption that if paid more, teachers would work harder – as if they aren’t working hard now. But others disagreed. Liebman said the purpose of a new pay system should to reward success and outstanding performance, as hard as that may be to measure. And Jeff Camp, the educational chair of the San Francisco based philanthropy Full Circle Fund, said that a differentiated pay plan should support a district’s educational strategy. Teachers by and large don’t go into the profession because of pay, but money incentives can work foster teacher retention, encourage teachers to teach subjects where they are in short supply and do additional work, like mentoring.

Camp, a member of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Advisory Committee on Education Excellence, acknowledged that it would take new money to switch to an alternative pay system. Taking away money that teachers currently get will never pass negotiations, and there’s obviously not new money now – at least not from the state.

That’s all the more reason to start the dialogue now, especially with the federal government waiting to hand out grants to get the process going.

By John Fensterwald on March 8th, 2010