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Paying Kansas City Teachers on Merit is Under Study

Posted on: Friday, 25 November 2005, 21:00 CST

By Joe Robertson, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Nov. 25--If they can work out the details with the school board, Kansas City teachers who do better work could someday get better pay.

Of course, the details are daunting enough that no area districts yet have crafted pay-for-performance agreements with teachers.

Missouri officials know of none anywhere in the state.

Kansas officials can cite only isolated rural districts that were more concerned with keeping teachers in hard-to-fill posts like higher math and science.

But recent successes in other parts of the country helped encourage Kansas City board member Bill Eddy during the latest contract negotiations with the district's teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers.

The board and the union agreed in a memorandum of understanding for a joint committee to research and present findings by June.

"It's an idea whose time has come," Eddy said. "I think it can benefit everybody."

If it's done right, he said, teachers will know what is expected of them. Strong teachers will earn rewards they deserve. And teachers who need help will know where they need to grow and have the support they need.

Unions that have long been wary of pay-for-performance proposals are beginning to back a new era of plans -- if they're done right.

"It's not a silver bullet," said Rob Weil, deputy director for educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers.

"If you're just changing the way you pay, you're not going to get where you want to get."

Programs that teachers have backed are nuanced in their evaluations, Weil said. They use multiple measuring systems agreed to between principals and teachers. They include mentoring programs, professional development and personnel to support complicated evaluation systems.

They don't remix a bad pay scale, but build on a good one.

"These things are not cheap," said Christy Levings, president of the Kansas National Education Association. "You have to be prepared for the work it's going to take to do this."

It's not easy breaking the mold that has served Kansas and Missouri school districts for decades.

Districts pay teachers according to a salary schedule. Teachers earn raises as they gain a year of experience and as they increase hours and degrees in postgraduate education.

Historically, salary schedules became the preferred method to deal with past disparities in pay between men and women, and between teachers of different race.

Kansas law leaves much of the pay structure up to negotiation. Missouri law, however, dictates more specifically that teachers be paid according to a salary schedule "applicable to all teachers."

And court rulings over the years have not looked favorably when districts made uneven attempts at merit pay, said Missouri School Boards' Association spokesman Brent Ghan.

So while it is "conceivable," Ghan said, that pay-for-performance plans might be crafted within a salary schedule, school districts could see unpopular or ill-constructed plans land in court.

Kansas City teachers probably would need to see improved support from the board before many would accept a pay-for-performance plan, local union president Judy Morgan said.

The new teacher contract, with a starting salary of just over $30,000 and a top salary around $60,000, still ranks among the lowest in the metropolitan area, she said. Teachers may need to see improved relations between management and teachers to engender trust in any new salary structure.

"We're not there yet," Morgan said.

She also cautioned against any suggestion that a pay-for-performance plan is needed to motivate quality teaching.

"All of our folks are working extremely hard," Morgan said. "No matter what their job, they give all they can give."

Eddy acknowledges that the board and the teachers must find their way down this road together. The outcome, he said, is wide open.

"We're just beginning to do the work," Eddy said. "We aren't demanding anything in six months or saying what the plan ought to have."

Denver spent six years on its plan. Teachers and administrators created an elaborate process that requires teachers to set measurable objectives with their principals. The structure includes bonuses for completing professional development, raising state test scores, and teaching in high-poverty schools or in special-needs classes.

Then the district went to voters and won a $25 million tax increase to support the plan.

"Denver did it right," Weil said.

Some efforts, like a plan voted down two years ago by teachers in Cincinnati, did not establish enough cooperation between administrators and teachers, he said.

Other plans were rushed and failed for being oversimplified.

"Too often people are in a hurry to drill down to the classroom level," Weil said.

In Missouri, districts might want to rely on how well a teacher's students performed on the Missouri Assessment Program -- or MAP -- test. Kansas might want to judge a teacher by one class's work on the Kansas Assessments.

But the size of a single class is generally regarded as too small to provide statistically viable numbers, Weil said.

Any district serious about exploring pay for performance has to be ready to invest more time and research than most people probably realize, said Jim Hays, a research specialist with the Kansas Association of School Boards.

"It's easy to talk about," he said. "But how do you pay someone based on performance? What does that mean? I can't tell you anyone that has found the right answer."

A teacher may be like the football coach who wins a championship with an all-state running back, Hays said: "Next year his team goes 4 and 5, but he's still the same guy."

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

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Source: The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri)

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