Pay-For-Performance
Giving teachers the power to weed out bad teachers does not necessarily mean they will do so. Setting high standards schools does not automatically insure that schools will reach those standards. To improve the educational level we must have a means of applying pressure to individual schools, a tool to make them want to meet the goals which have been set.
Part of the Oregon reform attempted to deal with this problem; the bill states that aid may be cut off if schools are not meeting the goals of the reform. However, negative pressure tends to have a detrimental effect on the educational process; it hurts students as much as it hurts teachers and administrators. We believe a positive approach will work much better. We propose to use a portion of the desegregation funds to implement a pay-for-performance plan for SLSD teachers and principals. Each teacher and principal, if all goals are met, will receive a year-and bonus equal to 10% of his or her salary. Thus for a teacher earning the district average of $29,56728SLSD Fact Sheet the year-end bonus would be $2,956.
It is extremely difficult to single out for attention the performance of an individual teacher. There are too many variables, from class size to the student's individual personalities, to accurately weigh a teacher's individual performance against an objective standard. Thus we propose to tie the bonus to group performance. The bonus of every teacher in a school and of the school principal will be determined by the performance of the exiting class on the skills exam. For instance, if a school has K–3, the performance of the 3rd graders as a whole on the skills test would determine the bonuses for all of the teachers and the schools principal.
Obviously, this is unfair in some ways; very good teachers will not get the reward they deserve, and very bad teachers will be able to hide in the ranks. But this is the goal. As noted, it is difficult to know how well a teacher is doing his or her job. But other teachers and the school's principal are in the best position to be able to make this judgement. A group-based incentive should cause teachers to pay attention to what is happening outside their own classrooms, to what other teachers are doing. It should cause teachers to bring pressure to bear on each other, since the bonus of individual teachers is decided largely by the performance of every other teacher in the school.
Next: Calculating the Bonus