Gov. Fails Teachers’ Pay Test

Nestled deep within Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s State of the State message this month was one great idea: to reform the pay system for California schoolteachers.

But given how he slathered this one nugget of good sense in his usual bellicose posturing, it’s unclear whether he even knows how good it is or -- here’s the ballgame -- whether he’s up to the complicated and costly task of implementing the reform.

The governor acknowledged the sad condition of public education in this state, which has fallen behind most of the country in student performance.

To change that, he said, “we must financially reward good teachers and expel those who are not.” At a special legislative session, he added, he will introduce a proposal to tie teacher pay and employment to “performance, not to just showing up.”

His words tapped into the great frustration that parents and practically all other taxpayers feel about the educational system. But what about his solution?

“There’s a lot of evidence that we can fail at simple-minded solutions to improving how teachers are paid,” Brad Jupp told me last week from his Denver office.

I called Jupp because experience has made him an expert in teacher compensation reform: Working through the Denver teachers’ union, of which he’s

a member, he is helping to implement what may be the most progressive conversion of an American school system to a “pay-for-performance” model.

Denver’s so-called ProComp system required nearly five years to design, including a four-year pilot program at select schools. If voters approve a funding measure in November, the full-scale version will start next year.

The system links pay to performance by allowing individual teachers to set their own goals for improvement, thus giving them some control over their own compensation. Raises are based on both the sophistication of their goals and their success in meeting them.

Most important, the system is aimed at raising the performance of all pupils, instilling high expectations and closing the gap in achievement between better and poorer students. The pilot program suggests that students taught by such teachers do improve measurably.

One unusual feature of ProComp is its endorsement by the teachers’ union, a crucial element in such a dramatic reorganization. Jupp says that, unlike conventional “merit pay” proposals, ProComp doesn’t smell to teachers like a tool for arbitrary and capricious judgments by their bosses.

“We convinced workers that this is a pay system within their control,” he explains. “We said, ‘We can pay you more, but the pay system will be based on professional standards.’ ”

Denver’s program involves a top-to-bottom rejiggering of the roles of superintendents, principals and teachers. It includes plenty of investment in training and resources. It recognizes that if you’re judging teachers by measuring their students’ progress, you need to collect a lot of objective data about student performance and place it in the teachers’ hands.

This isn’t a quick fix. “You start down a long trail,” says Cal Frazier, a former Colorado state education commissioner who consulted with the district. He says that most administrators from other states who ask him about the program “want to put it in effect in 12 months, and that won’t work.”

Success also requires goals to be set at the district or school level, not imposed by a state bureaucracy or divined from a governor’s utterances, Jupp says. That’s because the loftier the official, the more general the prescription and the harder to put it into practice. Let a governor declare that reading scores are too low, and the entire system deploys to raise them, leaving teachers of math, music and special ed beached.

To work, the reform also requires something else: money. Denver residents will vote this fall on a $25-million property

tax charge to pay for higher salaries.

Because ProComp will be mandatory only for new teachers (current faculty can opt to stay within the traditional seniority-based pay scale), most of the financing will first go into a reserve fund. Jupp estimates that in 12 to 20 years, turnover will render the entire faculty subject to the system, at which point salaries will settle at about 12% more than the district currently pays (plus inflation).

So, would our governor throw his weight behind such a plan?

State Education Secretary Richard Riordan knows the Denver initiative well because he’s on the board of the Broad Foundation, which helped finance the pilot program. He’s aware that the key to success is changing the whole system, not just the teachers’ pay scale.

But the Schwarzenegger administration’s version of pay-for-performance is crude. It’s a proposed constitutional amendment requiring that teacher pay be based largely on student results on standardized tests. (Question: How do you use standardized test scores to judge a teacher of autistic students or art?)

What’s more, the governor’s plan would forbid granting tenure to teachers with less than 10 years of experience, rather than the current standard of two years, and would outlaw seniority-based pay raises.

This proposal resembles the Denver program the way finger painting resembles AP chemistry. Teachers will, rightly, see it as a gun aimed between their eyes.

Yet it’s consistent with the demonization of teachers in the governor’s speech, as though they’re the only problem. It’s so plainly a recipe for failure that one suspects Schwarzenegger’s devotion to education must be a sham.

California schools won’t improve until teachers, administrators and the state work together. The governor needs to recognize the complexity of the task and drop the bluster.

He has earned an F on the first quiz. If he applies himself, however, he might someday score an A.

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You

can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com.