Denver Teachers OK Plan to Link Pay to Performance

Teachers here overwhelmingly approved an experiment linking the pay of some teachers to the academic performance of their students. Friday’s vote marks a significant departure from the traditional opposition by teachers’ unions to merit pay plans.

Denver’s “pay for performance” plan, as it is being called, would go a step beyond previous merit plans and for the first time tie a teacher’s salary directly to how well students perform in the classroom.

The two-year performance pay experiment that emerged from contract negotiations in Denver limits it to about 15% of the city’s teachers and gives teachers a role in devising the academic standards by which their work will be judged.

After two years, teachers will have an equal say with administrators in evaluating the pilot project, and the union will have a chance to take another vote on whether to accept performance standards as the permanent basis for pay raises for the district’s 4,300 teachers.

The experimental, cooperative approach has won endorsements from both national teachers’ unions.

“To me, it’s a good example of the school district and the teachers’ union working together to see if they can find ways of improving student achievement,” said Robert Chase, president of the National Education Assn., the nation’s larger teachers’ union. The Denver Classroom Teachers Assn. is an affiliate.

“We’re going to have thoughtful consideration of this [approach], and teachers are taking the lead,” said Jewell Gould, research director of the American Federation of Teachers.

Initially, the Denver school district proposed a radical across-the-board plan to have performance pay replace the traditional system of annual raises based on seniority. When union negotiators balked, the district revised its proposal to a one-year test before the two sides agreed on a two-year experiment.

“Up to this point, no teachers’ union has even been willing to experiment with this, so I say more power to them,” said Laura Lefkowits, the school board member who led the push for performance pay as a way to satisfy public demands for school accountability.

Cary Baird, spokeswoman for the Denver teachers’ union, suggested that the nation’s “entire educational system will gain from what we learn from this.”

Teachers at as many as 12 elementary schools and three middle schools will have a month to vote on whether to participate. Each of the approximately 450 teachers involved will immediately receive a $500 stipend and later up to $1,000 if their students meet achievement goals. In the second year, 200 more teachers at two high schools will be able to join.

The schools will use one of three sets of student achievement goals: scores on the standardized Iowa Test of Basic Skills, scores on skills tests created by teachers, or other specially designed measures of higher achievement resulting from additional training that teachers have undergone.