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Teachers React to Bonus Program: New State Plan Largely Uses FCAT Scores to Determine Who Will Benefit

Posted on: Wednesday, 12 April 2006, 15:00 CDT

By S. Brady Calhoun, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.

Apr. 12--Barbara Hemmert's band students were in tune Tuesday as they played "Emerald Horizon." But it remains to be seen if the talent displayed by Jinks Middle School students will translate into a reward for their teacher.

The Florida Legislature has approved a new plan that mandates bonuses for "effective" teachers. The plan, known as Effectiveness Compensation or EComp, requires that a bonus be given to the top teachers in every school district. The bonus will be based on tests, including the Florida Comprehensive Assessment

Test.

However, the FCAT is not given for band, choir, art or other electives, and it is not given to students in kindergarten through second grade or to juniors and seniors in high school. It remains to be seen how teachers in those areas will be evaluated.

Florida's Department of Education, individual school districts and state legislators are still working out the details. Although the plan is still murky, the Department of Education's Web site claims that all teachers will be eligible for the bonuses.

"I'm not intimidated," Hemmert said.

She said experts judge middle school bands each year at an annual concert performance. Those results are then publicized throughout the state.

Other teachers, administrators and education insiders have a host of questions and are quick to criticize the new plan.

One group, the Florida Education Association, a union that represents 130,000 teachers, is suing.

"We had no input into the process," said Rich Grady, the executive director of the Central Panhandle Service Unit. The union is suing mainly because of that lack of interaction. Grady said Florida law requires all bonuses, raises and other benefits to come about through negotiations with the union. Legislators did not talk to the union or survey teachers when they devised this program, Grady said.

The union is not necessarily opposed to performance pay, although Grady questioned why the Legislature would tie up money for bonuses when it could use the same money for permanent raises. Florida currently is $6,000 behind the national average in teacher pay, Grady added.

"Put up money for salaries, then we'll talk about bonuses," Grady said.

School leaders also questioned whether the new plan would be worth enduring the problems it could create.

"I have reservations about the program," said Libbie Pippin, the principal of Tyndall Elementary School. "Because looking at test scores is not the only measure of great teaching."

Bonuses have been tied to the FCAT since the program began. Schools currently get state bonuses based on how the student body does on the annual tests. That bonus money is divvied up by school employees in what local and state leaders have repeatedly called one of the most divisive issues in public education.

But Ed Mason, a first-grade teacher at Tyndall, said he has no problems with bonuses as long as they are based on wellthought-out criteria.

The state must be "very careful in how they're measuring that and it has to be fair and equitable," Mason said.

However, before they institute bonuses, the state and local school districts must find, retain and compensate highly qualified teachers, Mason added.

One of the concerns voiced by school leaders is that the bonus money tends to go to schools where the students have supportive parents who earn higher incomes. School leaders said they worry that young teachers will choose those schools over a school where they are needed.

The same issue now will apply to individual classrooms, opponents of the program argue. If the individual bonuses come through, talented instructors could turn down jobs with struggling students in favor of classes where the high-achieving kids are grouped together.

Anna McLain, the principal of Jinks, voiced that concern Tuesday. Jinks has not always gotten an "A" under the FCAT, and was recently ineligible for bonus money even though it got a "B."

"I'm worried that the next generation of teachers are going to go where they can get more money," she said. "And I don't blame them."

On their Web site, www.fldoe.com, education officials defend the new plan and the idea of rewarding some teachers while leaving others behind.

"Our primary goal is to maximize each child's achievement. We know there to be no significant correlation between either years of teaching experience, or level of degree obtained with actual growth in student performance," the Web site states. "For example, the best and worst teachers in a district, as measured by higher student achievement levels, may have both served the district for 15 years and have the same education level attained, so currently they are paid the same."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The News Herald

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