Tag Archives: performance pay

Abominable Snowbills Look to Gut Accountability in Colorado

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s snowing outside. Like, a lot. The good news is that the snowstorm means I get to hang out at home, drink hot chocolate, and make snow angels. The bad news is that there is an approximately 63 percent higher chance of attack by abominable snowmen like this one: View post on imgur.com Okay, that’s a lie. Abominable snowmen aren’t real (I hope). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t abominable things afoot—like bills gutting accountability, performance pay systems, and tenure reform. I’m sure you all recall that my Independence Institute friend Ross Izard is a big believer in accountability and tenure reform. He recently co-authored a Denver Post op-ed on the importance of these things. Last session, he wrote a big, long article on the dangers of Republicans mistakenly teaming up with the teachers union to dismantle accountability systems. Ross is working on updating that article for this year, but we’ll go ahead and get a head start today. Abominable snowbills wait for no one. The two bills in question are HB 1121 and SB 105. HB 1121 would enable local school boards to pass policies allowing teachers who are certified by the National Board […]

Read More...

New Study: Teacher Performance Pay Helps Students in India Learn

I don’t know a lot about India, except that a whole lot of people live there and my parents love the food (Me? I’ll stick with hot dogs and mac & cheese). But then yesterday I found this story about a study of India’s education system (PDF): We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD) in math and language tests respectively….

Read More...

Teachers as Entrepreneurs: A Refreshing Race to the Top Idea?

Knowing that teacher quality is so essential to successful student learning, Colorado’s lawmakers and education officials should be doing more to enact policies that promote teacher autonomy, excellence, and accountability. The Maryland Public Policy Institute does just that with its new report calling for “Teachers as Entrepreneurs” (PDF). The idea? Instead of placing all instructors under the terms of a centralized bargaining contract, allow for some individual teachers or teams of teachers to contract with a school district to perform instructional services. Either union or non-union, they could agree on setting terms regarding class size, basic working conditions, performance and differential pay, and retirement plans. This approach would give individual teachers greater freedom to determine whether they want to support and subsidize political activities. It would require state law to take a neutral position on the issue of unionization and exclusive representation.

Read More...

Two Chances to Hear from Douglas County School Board Candidates

It’s important for Colorado citizens to get involved in local school board elections. A lot of important policies and other decisions are set at the local level, so it’s good to make an informed choice and cast a vote! If you live in Douglas County, you’ll want to know about two forums taking place where you can get to meet the school board candidates, ask them questions, and learn about where they stand on important issues like school choice, school accountability, performance pay, school financial transparency, and more. The first one, sponsored by the Douglas County Federation [local teachers union], is tonight from 7-8:30 PM at Chaparral High School. If you miss that opportunity, I received an email from A Parent’s Voice founder Donnell Rosenberg alerting me to another forum coming up in September:

Read More...

Status Quo in Congress Holds Back Teacher Incentive Fund Growth … Somewhat

Alyson Klein, one of the ladies who cover happenings related to education on Capitol Hill for Education Week, reports about an important committee vote yesterday: A bipartisan effort to boost funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund by an extra $100 million went down to defeat today during the full Senate Appropriations Committee’s markup of the bill funding the U.S. Department of Education in fiscal year 2010. The bill already includes $300 million for the TIF, a teacher performance-pay program that is currently funded at $97 million. The proposed increase in the failed amendment would have been paid for by taking $100 million out of the federal State Grants for Improving Teacher Quality program. TIF provides competitive grants to state agencies, school districts, and charter schools that develop quality performance pay programs for teachers and for principals. As my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has outlined in his issue paper Denver’s ProComp and Teacher Compensation in Colorado (PDF) and elsewhere, local Colorado school districts have applied for and received a significant share of TIF grant money. Besides Denver, they include Eagle County, Harrison (El Paso County), and Fort Lupton. Our K-12 education compensation system badly needs a serious overhaul, and […]

Read More...

New Denver KIPP School Performance Pay Plan Latest Charter Innovation

With a variety of programs and greater flexibility from state laws and district policies, public charter schools can provide a great alternative for parents and students looking for something different. Because of that same flexibility, charter schools can serve as great laboratories of innovation for different practices that work. A couple months ago, while school was still in session, my Education Policy Center friends visited KIPP-Sunshine Peak Academy, a charter middle school located in west Denver. The national KIPP network of 82 charter schools has been made famous recently by the book Work Hard Be Nice, written by Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews.

Read More...

Fixing How Colorado Teachers Are Evaluated an Important Reform Piece

Hooray for Nancy Mitchell, and so glad she is working at Ed News Colorado these days. Her latest investigation probes the value of our current teacher evaluation system at identifying effective teachers, weeding out ineffective teachers, and providing support where necessary. The results? Not very good: Education News Colorado requested teacher evaluation data from the six largest districts, all in the metro area, which serve more than 40 percent of public school students statewide. The analysis found little difference between the results of evaluations given in affluent, high-performing Douglas County and those doled out in urban Denver Public Schools, where large numbers of students perform below average on state exams. Fewer than 2 percent of teachers in either district – or in Adams Five-Star School District or in Jefferson County Public Schools – were told they needed to improve their instructional skills.

Read More...

Professional Pay and Behavior in Jefferson County Contract Impasse?

Update , 12:45 PM: It looks like Jeffco isn’t alone with the impasse problem. Some teachers in Boulder Valley School District have taken it even further, staging a sick-out at Broomfield High School (H/T Complete Colorado). And it’s not the first time. Five years ago — when I was just a wee baby — the Boulder Valley Education Association staged a major “sick-out”. Then, as now, the terms of their collective bargaining contract read: There will be no strikes or other individual or concerted action designed to deprive the youth in the schools of services of Unit B employees [ed note: teachers and other certified professional non-administrative employees]. Any employee who engages in such actions during the term of this Agreement shall be subject to severe disciplinary action. Such disciplinary action shall be subject to the Grievance Procedure contained in this Agreement, except where applicable the state statute will apply. Earlier this week I pointed you to a breaking story from my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow about teacher contract negotiations breaking down in Colorado’s largest school district. Well, the online journalists at Face The State picked up the ball with a full-length story today, including quotes from a […]

Read More...

Brad Jupp the Latest Reformer Off to D.C.: Who Will Fill His Shoes?

Education Week‘s political blogger Alyson Klein wrote yesterday about another one of Denver’s education reform leaders being exported to the nation’s capital: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has a new teacher quality adviser … and he’s got a foot in both the merit pay and union camps. Brad Jupp is formerly a senior policy adviser to Denver-schools-superintendent-turned-U.S.-Senator Michael Bennet. In that role, he worked on school and district performance improvement and accountability, teacher effectiveness, and school choice, among other issues. After being on the short list for the job Duncan now holds, DPS superintendent Michael Bennet was appointed U.S. Senator. More recently, state senate president Peter Groff was appointed to direct an office in the U.S. Department of Education. Now Jupp joins Groff in the Department in the special role of teacher quality adviser. I would be remiss not to observe that when it comes to Brad Jupp, Denver’s loss is D.C.’s gain. He has a tough job cut out for him — that’s usually the case when it comes to effecting change in the Beltway bureaucracy. But he brings a rare combination of professional experiences coupled with a keen mind, determination, and a track record of some success. One […]

Read More...

Teacher Pay & Tenure System Like Pounding Square Peg into Round Hole

Have you ever tried to pound a square peg into a round hole (or vice versa)? How about after that doesn’t work a couple times, you go out and buy 100 of the same square pegs to keep trying what already failed? It makes about as much sense as most systems we have today for training, developing, paying, and retaining teachers. Sure, we’ve seen some progress with performance pay programs — Colorado has produced some leading examples — but the old-fashioned salary schedule still persists. Pay teachers based on seniority and academic credentials. Never mind, as the Denver Post‘s Jeremy Meyer observes from Urban Institute education director Jane Hannaway (with supporting evidence compiled here), that teachers overwhelmingly improve during the first four years of their career and then just stop: “It’s one of our very consistent findings,” said Hannaway, presenter last week at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in San Diego, citing at least two recent studies of teacher effectiveness. “The reason of course is not clear, but it’s in study after study,” she said. “Teachers do get better (in the beginning). If you look at the same teacher at Year One, they look a lot better at […]

Read More...