Following up on the veto by Florida Gov. Charlie Crist of a merit-pay plan: The Educated Guess doesn’t know much about the politics of Florida’s U.S. Senate race, in which Crist, a Republican, is apparently trailing. Some, like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, speculate that Crist vetoed the merit-pay bill that Republicans jammed through the legislature, because he plans to run as an Independent and wants to cater  to teachers.

I know only that Crist showed good judgment.

The two elements of the Florida bill – pay for performance and tenure reform – are critical to pursue in California as in Florida. But they must be adopted thoughtfully, in collaboration with teachers. In Florida, they were imposed hastily in calculated pursuit of additional points for the state’s Race to the Top application. Teachers were dismissed and ignored.

The bill would have tied at least 50 percent of a teacher’s pay increases to results on the  end of the year state tests. It would have abolished tenure for new teachers and put them on year-to-year contracts. Teachers whose evaluations showed a need for improvement in two of five years could have been fired.

The goal of pay reform – jettisoning the step-and-column schedule that treats effective and ineffective teachers alike – must be to make teaching an attractive, long-term profession for college graduates and second-career workers by inspiring and rewarding excellence. Florida’s narrow measure – one test result without controls – would have discouraged people from becoming teachers and distorted teachers’ priorities. With that much money on the table, drills and test prep would be all-consuming. Kids would be fed a high-carb diet of scripted learning.

There are many ways to measure teachers’ effectiveness with students and teachers’ impact on a school’s learning environment: leadership, collaboration with other teachers, classroom techniques and management, relations with parents. Scores on standardized tests,  as a measure of students’ knowledge of state standards, must be in the mix, too – and a factor in a teacher’s pay and evaluation.

Measuring student academic growth

Whether it’s 10 or 30 percent should be left to local bargaining. Regardless, the challenge is to measure the growth of a student’s knowledge over the course of a year. That requires at least a test at the start of the year as well as the end-of-the-year exam. Florida’s measure omitted this and didn’t take into account factors involving special education students and variations in students’ backgrounds and behavior (one teacher getting a cluster of  particularly unruly students)  that can lead to yearly fluctuations in test scores but can be minimized with several years’ averages in test scores.

One other annoying factor about the Florida bill: Legislators would have cut every district’s budget 5 percent to come up with money to pay for new tests in every subject – in a year when school districts are scraping for dollars.

Tenure – granting of due-process rights – should  be changed in most states, including California, where it is granted after only two years of teaching and creates bureaucratic and expensive obstacles to removing truly ineffective teachers. But teachers also need to be protected from capricious and arbitrary actions. The key is effective evaluations that opportunities for improvement with enforceable consequences. Florida’s bill didn’t meet that standard.

Race to the Top has prompted impressive reforms  in other states. Delaware and Tennessee, the two states that won the first round of money, negotiated with teachers on how to tie teacher evaluations to student success.

Crist has said he’ll include teachers in the process of revising the state’s Race to the Top application. That’s far better than the punitive, imperious approach that the legislature took.

By John Fensterwald on April 18th, 2010