Merit Pay Gets a Failing Grade in Our Schools
The advocates of merit pay for teachers claim that they are on the cutting edge of a national trend in education. They predict that paying teachers a bonus if students improve their scores on standardized tests will attract and retain the most effective teachers. And they go to amazing lengths to claim that teachers oppose “pay for performance” to protect the status quo.
Nonsense. Merit pay schemes don’t work because they don’t deliver on their promise to improve teaching. The strongest incentives for teachers and all working people are competitive salaries and good working conditions.
United Teachers-Los Angeles opposes a merit pay plan proposed by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines and Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller of the Los Angeles Unified School District because it threatens the future of public education. Based on case studies across the country, UTLA believes that the Cortines-Miller plan will speed up the “brain drain” of seasoned teachers to competing districts by attaching more strings to a fair salary at the LAUSD.
Bonuses are no substitute for correcting a perverse pay scale. The district attracts emergency credentialed teachers because it pays them well, compared with salaries in 46 public school districts in L.A. County. The longer you work here, though, the lower your wages fall compared with neighboring cities. For example, a teacher with five years’ experience--paid $38,668 annually--is in the bottom third among his or her peers in local schools. And a 25-year veteran with a master’s degree earns less than an elevator inspector with a high school diploma and four years on the job.
The salary imbalance is one of the main reasons that the LAUSD loses so many talented teachers. In 1989, UTLA members struck for pay raises that made us among the best-paid faculties in the county. That advantage evaporated in 1992 when teachers gave back 10% of our paychecks to stave off what we were told was nothing less than impending economic ruin.
Although the economy has rebounded, Cortines and Miller have no plans to straighten out twisted LAUSD salaries. The district claims the bonuses offered would sweeten a 6% across-the-board raise. What a fraud! The plan would just continue a 2% supplement teachers already receive, and another 3% will barely cover increased health care premiums. That leaves a 1% raise and a lottery ticket called merit pay.
Officials in Connecticut took an opposite tack a few years ago when that state’s schools were in serious trouble. Today Connecticut tops the nation in reading and math scores, a turnaround made possible by higher salaries for qualified faculty, increased licensing standards and mentoring for all new teachers.
Meanwhile, educators in Fairfax County, Va., dropped their merit pay system because it was widening the income gap between schools. They found that most bonuses went to affluent schools while little changed in poorer schools, where teachers’ enthusiastic performance couldn’t offset students’ economic hardships.
A similar experiment would be disastrous in Los Angeles, where the gap between haves and have-nots has reached alarming levels. Today, more than 70% of LAUSD students live at or below the poverty line. Education experts uniformly agree that test performance is linked to income level. It’s reasonable to expect reading scores to improve if working families receive a fair share of the economic recovery.
Cortines and Miller cynically point their fingers at teachers and demand “accountability” to deflect blame from management for LAUSD failures. Which of the recent scandals would they hold teachers accountable for? The Belmont Learning Complex fiasco, or the clumsy attempt to replace that facility with the highly successful Evans Community Adult School? Did teachers cause the swollen district bureaucracy? Or bungle the school-repair program? The bloody trails from those crimes stretch back to the superintendent’s office. Of course, it should come as no surprise that top LAUSD officials are and always have been the highest-paid administrators in Los Angeles County. Where’s “pay for performance” when you need it?
It isn’t too late to give more than 710,000 LAUSD students a shot at a good education. The Cortines-Miller plan would throw gasoline on the fire now consuming our schools, and UTLA members are determined to stop them before they light a match.
