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9 Schools Get $720,000 for Teacher Bonuses

Posted on: Friday, 10 March 2006, 21:00 CST

By Jeanne Russell, San Antonio Express-News

Mar. 10--Teachers at 100 Texas schools, nine in the San Antonio area, will earn extra cash this year as part of a merit pay plan created by Gov. Rick Perry last year.

Teachers at the chosen schools will get bonuses ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 for what they've achieved in the past.

They'll then design programs to determine how any future bonuses will be distributed. In the next two years, they'll qualify for bonuses again if student scores continue to climb.

It's all part of a three-year, $10 million pilot program Perry created last year by executive order and touted in recent months on the campaign trail. Low-income schools that either earned one of the state's top two ratings for student test scores or posted gains in math and reading were chosen for the pilot program.

"It rewards past performance in the first year. It is designed to drive student performance in the second and third years," Perry spokesman Rachael Novier said. "It's important to note: This is what we see as a long-term effort."

Seven of the nine local schools are in the San Antonio Independent School District, offering Superintendent Ruben Olivarez a vehicle for an idea he has championed but been unable to fund.

Teachers and principals in the chosen schools, which also include a Northside middle school and an Edgewood elementary school, will have input into the plan and a vote on its final form.

The grants range from $60,000 to $180,000, depending on student enrollment. All together, grants going to the nine local schools total $720,000.

At Fenwick Elementary School in SAISD, teachers were honored, Principal Sandra Beers said. And they already are wondering how they'll design a system to include teachers who work with little children who aren't tested, or who teach subjects such as physical education and music.

The pilot program calls for 75 percent of the bonuses to go to teachers, but it gives schools flexibility to include other school staff with the remaining 25 percent. It requires that the school use quantifiable measures of success, such as tests.

Richard Ingersoll, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on merit pay for teachers, raised questions about the requirement that educators, in effect, design their own bonus plans.

"I'm skeptical because it's not easy to do, and it will be trial and error, and it will be only two years," he said. "On the one hand, it's good to engage those it's going to affect. On the other hand, it's kind of tossing the burden to them to figure out."

Teachers often have been wary of linking test scores to teacher salaries, and merit pay has gone nowhere in the Texas Legislature.

Shelley Potter of the San Antonio Alliance said it is open to a fair plan that doesn't rely on one measurement.

"There's a lot of concern that there's an overemphasis on testing," she said. " If you tie teacher pay to testing, you ratchet up that emphasis even more.

"There's a lot of debate about whether that would be a good thing," Potter said, adding that the Perry plan should give schools more time to design their own plans.

Allen Odden, a University of Wisconsin education professor who has designed performance pay plans, said Kentucky, for example, saw results from merit bonuses for about 10 years.

But Odden questioned whether Perry's plan could ever go statewide.

"States aren't going to have programs that pay $10,000 per teacher. Just do the math -- it's going to be a couple billion dollars. They're not going to spend that kind of money," he said.

For now, schools are responding happily to the idea of unexpected cash for teachers.

At a recent Edgewood board meeting, "everyone was so excited about that $60,000 and what it's going for, for teachers, for merit raises," district spokeswoman Lorraine Pulido-Ramirez said.

San Antonio ISD has talked about performance pay for at least two years but lacked the money to do anything, Olivarez said. Last year it gave $200 for school supplies to third-grade teachers whose students made large gains by grade level, or across the entire school.

"The issue has been where are we going to get the resources," he said. "We believe any performance pay should be above salary increases."

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Source: San Antonio Express-News

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