Scrap Prescribed Teacher Pay

“Haslam targets teacher salaries”
by Julie Hubbard
The Tennessean
January 11, 2012

Tennessee teachers may lose the promise of annual raises based solely on years of service and number of degrees, a system the governor wants to replace with salaries based on student performance, how tough a teaching position is to fill and other measures.

Gov. Bill Haslam said Tuesday he wants to give districts the option of ditching a state-mandated salary scale and creating pay plans that address their own needs, plus reward high performers. Denver City Schools and several other districts tie teacher pay to student performance.

In Tennessee some extra money to fund raises or bonuses would come from removing the mandate on schoolwide average class sizes. Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman said too many state mandates suppress district-level innovation.

“We don’t think that every single person in our education system should be treated the same,” he said.

But Tennessee Education AssociationPresident Gera Summerford echoed what the nation’s teachers’ unions long have said about pay-for-performance plans — they don’t encourage necessary collaboration.

“There tends to be this movement toward competition between teachers, schools and school systems, and I just don’t see that as a way to encourage success,” she said.

Brandyn Surratt teaches first-graders at Fall-Hamilton Enhanced Option School south of downtown Nashville. She’s looking forward to moving from $42,829 to $44,127 for her salary soon when she hits the nine-year mark on the state’s step scale. If she finishes her master’s degree, that amount would go to $48,000.

But if Haslam’s plan passes the General Assembly, she’d more likely be rewarded based on helping her urban core students make learning gains, although Metro administrators haven’t said how they’d rewrite the pay scale, if at all. Surratt likes the idea of pay based on position and performance.

“It’s hard to keep teachers in the inner city,” she said. “I struggle just as much teaching 13 students as someone teaching a class of 25 because the needs are high. You could get some younger teachers to come in and stay if you make it more worth their while.”

Flexibility wanted

The current pay structure requires the Tennessee Board of Education to set a flat, minimum dollar amount for teacher salaries each year. The step scale builds on pay based on experience and educational attainment, with the state paying, on average, 75 percent of a teacher’s salary.

Districts frequently add a local supplement, so a starting teacher with a bachelor’s degree earns $33,900 in Williamson County versus $32,695 in Wilson County.

At least 20 of the state’s 136 school districts already have state approval to try their own pay scales, using local money or federal grants. In Putnam County, 61 percent of teachers opted into a pay scale based on evaluations.

Florida rolled out a mandatory bonus policy for teachers in 2006 based on student test scores. Last year, the Florida Legislature passed a law tying teacher salaries to evaluations, which will be mandatory beginning in 2014.

The bonus plan didn’t go into effect statewide because the Legislature didn’t fund it, said Florida Education Association spokesman Mark Pudlow. In the counties that implemented the plan with their own money, teachers who taught the wealthiest students generally won the bonuses, he said, because they posted the best test scores.

“Out of 180,000 teachers, I am sure there were those who supported it,” he said. “But the response from teachers was overwhelmingly negative.”

His union is objecting to the new Florida law because of a dispute over whether there are margins for error in formulas used to calculate student learning gains, he said.

A Vanderbilt University study on teacher pay-for-performance, conducted in Metro Schools and released in 2010, showed giving teachers large bonuses based on student learning gains didn’t increase those gains across three years.

Middle Tennessee school leaders said it’s too early to say how they’d use the flexibility, but Sumner County Schools Director Del Phillips said he agrees with Haslam’s contention that districts should be allowed to create their own pay plans because local leaders know what’s holding the district back and how to address that.

Wilson County Human Resources Supervisor Mary Ann Sparks said a bonus system for teachers in hard-to-recruit subjects, such as high school math and science or special education, could be useful since they continue to have vacancies.

Class sizes are hot topic

The pay plan legislation is linked to Tennessee’s class size limits.

Under the current system, districts must hire extra teachers to keep student ratios smaller. The new plan would allow districts to pay teachers more for larger classes.

The caps are 25 students for grades kindergarten-three, 30 for grades four-six and 35 for seven-12, levels Haslam’s plan would keep in place. Required schoolwide averages run five students lower than the maximums and would be eliminated under the plan.

Huffman estimated increasing class sizes without hiring teachers will save $759,000 statewide in the first year, which would go toward the new pay plan.

He said research shows larger class sizes don’t negatively impact student learning, although the teachers union disagrees, and studies on the topic have been mixed.

One of the most cited — Project STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio) — was done in Tennessee in the 1980s. It showed young children in classes of 13-17 posted greater learning gains in reading than those in regular-sized classrooms, and those gains lasted when they returned to larger classes.