Think bigger

Gov. Bob McDonnell on Tuesday rolled out Virginia's teacher merit-pay plan, inviting 57 districts that have struggling schools to apply for $3 million in total state funding for the 2011-12 school year, reports the Associated Press today. It's a good idea, but it doesn't go far enough. Here's why a $5,000 annual bonus for good teachers taking on hard jobs is far too small.

The Governor proposes that at least 40 percent of a teacher's performance evaluation will be tied to student academic performance, including improvements in standardized test scores. Schools that receive grants must adopt teacher-appraisal systems that fit state-approved evaluation methods and performance metrics.

The General Assembly approved the pilot performance-pay initiative as part of McDonnell's amendments to the state budget. A key component of the Republican governor's education agenda, the point is to attract good teachers to so-called hard-to-staff schools. Such schools include those at risk of losing state accreditation and those that have a high percentage of English learners or special-needs students.

"Teachers who make a commitment to students in hard-to-staff urban and rural schools, despite circumstances that often prompt colleagues to seek assignments elsewhere, deserve our admiration," McDonnell said in a statement, "and when they succeed in raising the achievement of students in these schools, their performance should be rewarded."

The Virginia Department of Education lists 169 schools that are eligible for performance pay under the program. Richmond City Public Schools has the highest number, with 23 eligible schools. The deadline for districts to apply is June 15, and the agency will announce the grants in the summer.

Under the plan, each teacher can earn up to $5,000 in additional pay. In applying for the grants, school divisions may make all teachers in a hard-to-staff school eligible for performance pay or limit eligibility to specific groups of teachers, based on what subject they teach.

But the educational world has been rocked, as a recent New Yorker article explains, with the realization that the difference between a good teacher and a poor one on student performance is huge. The students in the class of a very good teacher can learn up to 1.5 years' worth of material in one school year, writes Malcolm Gladwell, while students of a very poor teacher will learn about a half year's worth. Thus, in one year, the difference between a very good teacher and a very poor one for each student in their classes is a full year-every single year:

"Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a 'bad' school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers."

So McDonnell's plan to reward and hopefully keep good teachers is a step in the right direction. But really good teachers are often very talented people who could make far more money elsewhere. For them, $5,000 isn't much incentive to stay, and it's going to go only to those in hard-to-staff schools. Conversely, weak teachers are costing the system, in terms of student performance, significant amounts of money. Gladwell quotes experts who say the U.S. could close the performance gap with, say, Canada, simply by replacing the bottom 6% to 10% of teachers with even average quality educators.

So here's another step in the right direction. Abolish teacher pay increases for things like advanced degrees and seniority. Take the money that would normally go to a teacher with decades of experience and a master's degree and invest it instead with a teacher who gets results.

In an ideal world, that's the same person-but not always. The effect would be to reward the things we, as taxpayers, want accomplished instead of the behaviors that teachers use to climb the compensation ladder. Would it discourage some established teachers from continuing? Exactly. It would also give hope to those young teachers who pour their hearts into educating our children that their efforts will be rewarded appropriately, and sooner rather than later.

Some teachers, of course, will hate this suggestion. Their pay increases, they will complain, will be tied to subjective performance evaluations instead of objective criteria like degrees earned. That, admittedly, is a danger. Another problem will be keeping the pipeline full of talented potential new teachers to take the places of the poor ones who leave when they realize their pay, if they keep doing the same old things, is going to stay at the same old level. Gladwell notes that it is extraordinarily difficult to identify good teachers and weed out the bad ones before they get into the system.

But there are ways to deal with those objections. The first step is to recognize how central it is that we find good teachers. And when we start to value good teaching, then maybe more people with classroom talent will want to be teachers.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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