Learning Curve: Performance anxiety

Teacher quality in Georgia can’t be measured by pay stubs, which fatten with seniority and advanced degrees.

While a lockstep compensation model provides everyone in the field with the same protective coloration, it also hides highly effective teachers from view and recognition.

That’s why the White House has dangled Race to the Top grants as carrots to encourage states to embrace salary systems that reward the teachers who are most effective in improving student achievement.

As Ann Clark, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools chief academic officer, testified at a recent U.S. congressional hearing: “This is a more equitable system than seniority or degree-based compensation because it is focused on student outcomes. What matters most is how well the student is educated, not the teacher.”

Under pressure to bolster Georgia’s Race to the Top application —we narrowly missed winning a grant in the first round and hope to win one in the next — Gov. Sonny Perdue attempted to push through a merit pay bill earlier in this legislative session, but failed.

Last week, in the political equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, Perdue attached an amendment to another education bill that at least offers the federal government evidence that Georgia is laying the groundwork for performance pay, if not actually adopting it.

The amendment to Senate Bill 521 mandates statewide uniform teacher evaluations — now school systems rely on their own evaluation tools — that weigh student progress on standardized tests, peer review and parental input.

While it falls short of outright merit pay, the amendment tacked onto Senate Bill 521 opens the path to compensating Georgia teachers based on how much progress their students show on standardized testing. The state’s two largest teacher organizations oppose the amendment, maintaining it sets the stage for merit pay.

The amendment stunned teachers, who had assumed that merit pay was entombed for this session and not a threat on the third-to-the-last day of the General Assembly.

Now, they are bombarding elected officials with protests, hoping to duplicate the success of their Florida colleagues, who just torpedoed a sweeping merit pay law with a torrent of 42,000 angry e-mails.

The hostility toward merit pay reflects several things, including mistrust between teachers and administrators. Teachers believe the merit pay won’t go to the best teachers but to allies of the administration, who are more likely to assign their pals the easy-to-teach students.

But the overarching objection to merit pay is that it holds teachers accountable for factors outside their control.

When you counter that it seems eminently reasonable to hold teachers responsible for students showing at least some progress, teachers will tell you about students who don’t show up for class, whose health problems cause them to fall asleep in class, whose family lives have been disrupted by violence or evictions and homelessness.

Teachers ask: Would anyone blame cardiologists if their heart attack patients continued to smoke, eat country-fried steaks for breakfast and polish off a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream every night?

The research on whether performance pay leads to improved student outcomes remains sketchy, largely because there aren’t enough examples of long-standing policies to draw any sweeping conclusions.

And no one is quite sure yet how to fairly assess those teachers — 70 percent of the teaching force in Georgia — who teach in areas for which there are no standardized tests to chart student progress.

How do you measure the effectiveness of music, art or physical education teachers?

Teachers also resent the increasing degradation of their advanced academic degrees, noting the irony of spending their days lecturing students on the importance of education to their futures. And they point out that it was school systems that first pressured teachers to obtain master’s degrees.

While research has not shown a strong link between student achievement and advanced degrees, an ongoing teacher effectiveness study at the University of North Carolina found that teachers who obtained master’s degrees after they were in the classroom improved student achievement in high school math and English and in middle school science.

On its face, merit pay appears logical, but the merit of the concept has yet to be tested.