L.A. Schools’ Merit Plan Could Break New Ground

In attempting to tie teachers’ pay to students’ performance, Los Angeles Unified School District managers are proposing a dramatic experiment that goes far beyond anything previously tried in an urban system.

Enthusiasm for pay-for-performance policies is spreading nationally, fueled by a belief among some politicians and policy experts that what’s good for business--competition and financial rewards--should be good for education.

So far, however, there’s little evidence to support that argument, especially in a system as large and complex as Los Angeles’.

The most ambitious pay-for-performance contracts are to be found in affluent, high-performing suburban districts. Even there, the provisions are more limited than the bold plan envisioned by L.A. Unified officials that will be at the center of contract talks beginning next week. And educators are reluctant to attribute gains in those districts to the effects of bonuses.

One of the most sophisticated efforts can be found outside Denver, in Douglas County, the nation’s fastest-growing county during the 1990s. The 6-year-old program is voluntary and offers rewards to both individuals and groups of teachers that can total $3,000 a year or even more.

Teachers--not administrators--decide not only what academic goals they want to pursue but also how progress is to be measured.

Los Angeles school officials say they borrowed from the Douglas County plan in developing their own. But there is a stark difference. The L.A. Unified plan would be built around standardized test scores and state rankings. Largely because of that, the district and its teachers will be on a collision course when negotiations begin.

In a system plagued by dismal test scores and a lack of public confidence, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said drastic action is necessary to get schools to focus attention on students’ basic skills.

He is proposing a modest across-the-board raise and bonuses for teaching staffs at low-performing schools that improve their test scores by a certain amount. More controversial is the idea of paying bonuses to particularly distinguished individuals, again based partly on their students’ test scores. Many details of the proposals are open to negotiation.

Although the effort is unprecedented, Cortines said he believes cash awards offer the best hope for mobilizing schoolwide campaigns to improve. Besides, California and a number of other states already are awarding schoolwide bonuses for test scores. He said he’s merely getting schools in L.A. focused on the same thing. “This is difficult and hard work,” he said. “But we can’t avoid the issue of test scores in this state. It’s not the only issue, but we have to deal with the perception of the public about public education.”

United Teachers-Los Angeles is demanding a 21% pay hike and has rejected the bonus idea outright. The union has organized marches and has threatened to strike if pushed on the pay-for-performance issue.

Union officials say the use of test scores to determine bonuses has failed every time since it was introduced in schools in England in the 1700s. They say it is inherently unfair because teachers’ pay would be affected by factors over which they have no control, such as students’ motivation, home lives and parental involvement--or lack thereof.

Instead of working together, teachers would feel they had to compete with their colleagues.

“Rather than throwing money at results . . . why don’t we invest up front in things like training, lower class sizes and, basically, giving teachers incentives to not leave . . . by paying competitive salaries,” said UTLA President Day Higuchi.

Douglas County, a bedroom community for Denver’s high-tech center and thriving financial and aerospace industries, has managed to avoid the controversies over pay for performance. Teachers, even those skeptical in the beginning, are now accustomed to the idea of earning financial rewards.

Getting Teachers to ‘Buy In’ to Plan

But the key lessons of Douglas County--go slow and listen to teachers--may not be welcome in Los Angeles.

“That’s the way you get your buy-in,” said Rob Weil, a math teacher who as president of the Douglas County Federation of Teachers travels around the country speaking about the plan.

In the early 1990s, the district faced a financial crunch brought about by a sharp decrease in state aid. In community forums on how to save money, many residents were skeptical of the way the district paid its teachers. As is typical in education, salaries were based on longevity and credentials rather than on skill, effort or effectiveness.

When voters defeated a bond measure needed to pay for new schools, they sent a signal to the union and the district.

“It became clear to us that if we didn’t do something, we were going to be in trouble,” Weil said.

Leaders of teachers unions across the country have come to similar conclusions and that’s one reason that pay-for-performance efforts are gaining momentum nationally.

Last fall, a national summit of governors and business leaders called for at least 10 states to launch pay-for-performance experiments.

“It comes from a fundamental belief in the workings of the market at the micro-level,” said Theodore R. Mitchell, the president of Occidental College. “If you put money on the table and say, ‘I’ll give you that money if you go from here to there,’ then people will work harder to get that.”

But education research dating back to the 1930s has found that teachers--like workers in many other fields--are mostly motivated by a desire to do a good job. They get the greatest satisfaction from the stimulation of kids engaged in learning.

Districts should tap into that and “create a way for teachers to work smarter, to develop their craft and to develop the skills that are missing,” Mitchell said.

In Cincinnati, the union has devised a complex “career ladder” that teachers would ascend, earning higher pay as they mastered various aspects of teaching. It is undergoing a pilot test this year.

In Cincinnati, as in Douglas County, the idea of linking pay to test scores was rejected.

New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is pushing to have test scores used to determine teachers’ bonuses. An arbitrator’s decision has forced the use of test score gains as the basis for teachers’ bonuses in the Colonial School District outside Philadelphia. But many teachers there say they’ll donate the bonuses to charity in protest.

Denver Public Schools is the only other large district in the country experimenting with paying teachers on the basis of scores on standardized tests. Under pressure from the school board and community members concerned about low test scores, the Denver Classroom Teachers Assn. agreed last fall to experiment with the idea. This year 350 teachers have volunteered to have their performances assessed on one of three measures--scores on standardized tests, scores on tests designed by the teachers or the impact on students of professional development classes.

Already, the changes required to implement the system more broadly--the need for student-by-student achievement data, a way to communicate with teachers, changes to the payroll system--are proving so profound that a decision on full implementation has been put back by two years, until the end of 2003.

In Douglas County, a district with 33,000 students, individual teachers can earn bonuses of $1,000 apiece for assembling portfolios that showcase their philosophy and skills. That’s the most controversial aspect of the contract, because some teachers say it rewards those who do a good job of selling themselves.

Other aspects of the contract boost teachers’ pay for taking on extra responsibilities and for learning particular skills designated by the district. Both are common elements of contracts nationwide and are part of what’s being proposed in Los Angeles.

The most popular--if not the most lucrative--aspect of the Douglas County contract involves group awards. Teachers--or, for that matter, groups of principals or even custodians--can decide on a measurable goal and, with district approval, pursue it.

At Ponderosa High School, for example, teachers and the principal looked at students’ performance and decided an area of weakness was the ability to read nonfiction and technical texts. English teachers came up with lessons in diagraming, outlining and the like. Then they taught their colleagues how to teach those techniques. That became the focus throughout the school and, after one year, the scores on a reading test chosen by the teachers to measure their progress had gone up substantially. In their July paychecks, teachers received an extra $495 each, minus taxes.

“Teachers have always worked hard, but this is the first time someone has said, ‘You did this particular work and here’s a little something for you,’ ” science teacher Katherine Dorfman said. “It was like getting a Christmas bonus in July.”

Use of Test Scores May Be Inevitable

The group incentives, Ponderosa Principal William Larsen said, have been a powerful tool. “We can work closely with the teachers to say here’s what we want to put in and we’ll pay you to do it and they do it,” he said.

Bill Hodges, a marketing executive who, as a community activist, helped design the pay-for-performance plan, said it has boosted public confidence in the district and its teachers. He said their plan has focused attention on students’ achievements without overemphasizing test scores.

But the use of test scores and state rankings may be inevitable. The Colorado Legislature has just approved bills that create a system for giving schools letter grades. That, some worry, will increase pressure to tie the grades to teachers’ pay.

That situation already exists in California, where schools were ranked this year for the first time on a scale of 1 to 10 and each school has been given a target for improvement.

Genethia Hayes, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said she and other board members are aware of the concerns of teachers and have some sympathy for them. She said that she and other board members may find it particularly difficult to accept the idea of paying bonuses to individual teachers.

But, she said, the idea of linking pay to a teacher’s expertise, effort and effectiveness in some fashion must be discussed.

“We really and truly want to explore it because there are teachers out there who are going above and beyond the call of duty and in the same building there are teachers who are just picking up their paycheck,” she said.