Teachers Dislike Merit Pay Program : Schools: The plan was established in Tennessee by Education Department nominee. Critics label it complicated, unrealistic and time consuming.

For 17 years, Nancy Shipner has taught kindergarten in the same room at Calvin Donaldson Elementary in an industrial neighborhood snuggled in the shadow of Lookout Mountain.

Last year, she was still earning less than $35,000, so she “jumped through the hoops” to qualify for a $2,000-a-year merit pay raise under Tennessee’s Career Ladder Program, begun in 1984 by former Gov. Lamar Alexander, whom President Bush nominated this week to be secretary of education.

But, like the majority of Tennessee teachers and administrators who join the program, Shipner did so with one hand over her nose.

Merit pay should be much simpler--teachers deserve more, and they should be paid more, Shipner argued.

Merit pay--arguably the attention-getting innovation that led to Alexander’s appointment as the nation’s No. 1 educator--establishes different pay levels for teachers based on their performance. To admirers, it is an incentive to better teaching. To detractors, it is a bureaucratic disaster that destroys teacher morale and retards system-wide pay hikes.

The controversy over merit pay is unlikely to slow Senate approval of Alexander’s nomination. Alexander’s political and educational credentials are broad: As governor, he increased the number of math and science teachers and raised budgets to put computers in junior high schools, and, more recently, he has served as president of the University of Tennessee. But his appointment is certain to focus attention on the impact of his most far-reaching program.

Groping for a way to keep good teachers, seven states have emulated Tennessee’s Career Ladder Program since 1984, according to a new report by the Southern Regional Education Board, an Atlanta-based research organization.

The board said that an additional 18 states have some form of teacher-incentive plan, including California, which has “mentor teachers,” who receive extra pay for working with other teachers to upgrade the profession and improve education.

Gale Gaines, a research associate at the board, said the mix of efforts “is evolving.”

“There’s definitely a lot going on,” but the merit pay concept is too new to have proven itself good or bad, she said.

Tennessee teachers beg to differ.

Too complicated, too time consuming, divisive, unfair and unrealistic are just a few of the printable adjectives teachers use to describe the plan. Even state education officials concede that the original program needed extensive overhauling to be a minimally acceptable incentive tool.

“We took a long, hard look at the program and have made some changes,” said Brad Hurley, assistant to the state education commissioner. “We’ve tried to simplify the process.”

But, obviously, the changes are not enough for many educators. Hurley said he has a cousin who teaches second grade, “and she’s elected not to go through it.”

The program has three levels, and each pays teachers an additional $1,000 a year after their length of employment makes them eligible and they go through a series of evaluations, in-class observations and written tests. Principals, assistant principals and supervisors receive slightly more.

On top of that, more money can be earned for extra work, typically up to about $4,000. But, because this means working after school or during summer vacation, educators do not see this as “merit pay.”

Extra pay for extra work is “not much of a reward,” said Al Mance, assistant executive secretary of the Tennessee Education Assn.

According to statistics from the state department of education, more than 39,000 of the state’s 50,000 teachers participate in the Career Ladder Program, but only about 7,000 of those are in the two upper levels. Most are concentrated in Level 1.

Only about one-fourth of all educators who are eligible for the higher levels actually have made it to them.

Qualifying for the three levels used to take an entire semester, but now the process can be completed in 30 days, officials say.

James Cunningham, a Chattanooga teacher who has taught computer science since 1970, remains unimpressed. “I’m not in any of the ladders at all,” he said. “I opted not to get in until they got the bugs out of it.”

Opinion surveys by the Tennessee Education Assn. consistently show that huge majorities of the state’s teachers think the program is “neither effective nor fair,” Mance said. The National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers’ union, uses similar arguments to oppose the concept.

Conversations with teachers, union officers and principals show that those who participate do it for the money, but most teachers believe the program’s negative aspects offset its financial benefit.

For example, many teachers report that the three levels have the effect of separating staffs into “good” and “bad” groups, thereby straining relations and hurting morale. Also, they argue that it is impossible to objectively evaluate teaching performances with the three classroom visits that are made.

As a measure of the conflict surrounding the evaluations, teachers in inner-city schools complain that their teaching styles often are judged by people with suburban attitudes and sensibilities. For example, they say, inner-city schools generally are noisier, but that does not mean an absence of order.

Many educators who fail to qualify for the increases have challenged the system, creating a bureaucratic nightmare for administrators. Some appeals are years old, and those who win can be paid retroactively. “It’s a mess,” said one Chattanooga school system official.

The program is criticized for not putting enough emphasis on developing skills. “Because you’re good this year doesn’t mean you’re good forever,” said Betty Williams, principal of Calvin Donaldson here.

But, outside the state, many education experts give the plan high marks.

Marty Connors, executive director of the Southern Republican Exchange, a Birmingham, Ala.-based research organization that has held numerous forums on education issues, said the plan “has to be good” if teacher unions oppose it. He asserted that the role of unions “is to protect the bottom group of teachers.”

In the nation’s capital, Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Education Information, said, “My sense is (that) the really good teachers like the program. They really don’t like the fact that bad teachers get paid the same as they do.”

Around Tennessee, some say the plan was a small step toward helping teachers get more money, that it called attention to the state’s sorry state of education and that it propelled Alexander into the national spotlight.

As education secretary, Alexander cannot set policy for local or state school systems, but he can set tone. However, Alexander, who left the governor’s office in 1987 after two terms, has not been in the forefront of the battle recently over merit pay.

“I think at the time what Tennessee did was bold and was correct and was out in front of what most states were willing to do and that we’ve had some good results,” he told the Knoxville News-Sentinel this fall, commenting about all aspects of education reform in the state.

But few people around here believe Tennessee’s merit pay plan could be applied on a national level. “That would be too massive a management problem,” said Gary Calfee, Chattanooga’s assistant superintendent for personnel, citing regional differences that make it difficult even to apply statewide standards of evaluation.

Calfee, who was heavily involved with implementing the program as the state’s director of teacher certification from 1985 to 1989, said: “Sometimes I think (the program) wasn’t worth it . . . . It wasn’t what I would have liked it to be, but little in life is.”