Rod Watson: Merit pay for teachers? The kids win

As the state’s big teachers union tries to swallow up charter schools, it would be funny if it gets indigestion from one local charter that’s paying teachers based on how their students perform.

That idea is anathema to most big unions, yet Charter School for Applied Technologies seems to be making it work for kids. In fact, the most interesting part of Tuesday’s Buffalo News story about the effort to unionize charters was the embrace of performance-based pay at the Town of Tonawanda charter that borders Buffalo.

The school faces many of the same demographic challenges the city schools face. In fact, 87 percent of the students come from the city, said Superintendent J. Efrain Martinez.

Yet the school has found a way to boost students’ scores: performance-based pay. Based mostly on state and school tests at the beginning and end of each school year, bonuses of 5, 6 or 7 percent are added to a teacher’s paycheck depending on how much growth the students show.

It’s an approach that answers criticisms of merit pay systems that don’t take into account a student’s starting point, or that limit payouts to only the top-performing teachers—thereby engendering resentment and a competition that keeps teachers from sharing productive approaches.

No one says merit pay is the only way to achieve improvement, and it’s certainly not the way favored by most unions.

“Every study that I’ve read shows that merit pay doesn’t work,” says Phil Rumore, president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation.

“Teachers don’t work for an additional couple of bucks in their paychecks; that’s not what motivates teachers,” he adds, making a claim I suspect will change come contract time.

Rumore advocates smaller class sizes, which makes sense. But so does giving teachers something extra to work for in a way that assesses what each one is doing. The public is getting tired of paying for nonperformance, and kids can’t afford it.

As for studies, maybe Rumore hasn’t read the 2007 analysis from the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform that looked at a pilot project in the Little Rock schools.

Comparing demographically similar elementary schools—some using merit pay and some not—researcher Gary Ritter and his team found that “students in the [merit pay] schools improved, while the students in the comparison schools decreased.”

Ritter, director of the university’s Office for Educational Policy, is the first to acknowledge that “the jury is still out” on merit pay. But he says many of the criticisms can be avoided by well-designed programs that don’t pit teachers against one another, that rely on bonuses rather than penalties and that “focus on growth and improvement rather than just yearend scores.”

Ritter’s approach raises a fundamental question for merit pay naysayers: If teachers can’t help kids—even those from challenging backgrounds—make progress, what are they there for? Martinez takes a similar stance, focusing on solutions—such as home visits—rather than “blaming the students and parents.”

Ritter said the Little Rock experiment died amid opposition from the union there. He said unions seem to fear the “camel’s nose under the tent” when it comes to merit pay. It makes you wonder how NYSUT and Applied Technologies would coexist, especially as publicity over the unionization effort highlights the differences between traditional schools and charters.

Instead of looking at traditional schools and wondering “Why?” the public might start looking at the charter school approach and asking “Why not?”

rwatson@buffnews.com