Salary Based on Performance Tested

Take a ride to Pacoima to find an experiment in alternative pay plans for teachers. It is one of but a few offered nationally, and it is concluding its first year.

Convinced that student performance would improve if teachers were given monetary rewards for exceptional skills and knowledge, Principal Yvonne Chan has sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars and three years of planning into a performance-based pay schedule at her Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, a charter school in Pacoima.

Many education reformers and Republican lawmakers have long advocated some kind of pay-for-performance plan for teachers, hoping to halt California’s long slide into educational peril.

At Vaughn, teachers who are the most successful at teaching kids to read or helping Spanish-speakers learn English can get an extra $1,300 a year. All full-time school employees receive a bonus of $1,000 or more if student test scores meet improvement goals. There are bonuses for improving student attendance, involving parents in education and helping with extracurricular programs.

Depending on their dedication and pedagogical prowess, beginning teachers at Vaughn can boost their pay to $38,000 if all goals are met. For other Los Angeles Unified teachers, the starting salary is $32,000, under a traditional pay schedule, which increases teacher salary based on years of service and degrees obtained.

“This way, you can increase the retention of teachers and pay teachers more. This drives a more persistent and focused staff, and that will increase quality,” Chan said. “This whole single salary for any educator is so much in the Dark Ages. . . . You don’t get incentives. You don’t compensate people for a job well done. It’s not a professional scale; it’s like an auto worker.”

Right now, veteran Vaughn teachers have a choice between the performance-based and traditional salary schedules while new teachers start on the alternative plan. About one-third of the school’s 66 teachers have chosen the nontraditional salary schedule.

“In the first semester, 60% of the teachers got the full amount,” Chan said. “A new, emergency [credentialed] teacher got the full amount while a fully credentialed teacher with experience at Vaughn and another school did not get any. Those who did not get the bonuses have quickly improved since then, so we believe it’s working.”

The true test will not come until summer, when Vaughn gets its standardized test results back.

Education experts, in a quest to improve teacher quality, are closely watching the Vaughn experiment, made possible by the fact that charter schools are free of most rules that govern public schools, including collective bargaining agreements.

“We are doing an ongoing study of how things are playing out at Vaughn Street,” said the co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, Allan Odden, who helped Chan formulate the pay plan.

Some union officials look askance at the Vaughn plan, saying it too closely resembles merit pay. They object to the idea of teachers competing for a limited pot of bonus money.

But Chan said she is happy to give merit pay to everyone who earns it, whereas traditional merit pay plans limit the number of people who can get bonuses.

Union officials are backing a bill now in the state Legislature that would make local union contracts apply to charter school employees as well. However, the bill would allow employees at those schools to amend contracts to meet the particular needs of their campus.