(From The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2010)
By BARBARA MARTINEZ
School districts around the country are eyeing a tentative deal that would make unionized teachers in Washington, D.C., eligible for merit pay, although district officials know replicating the model will hardly be easy.
For years, teachers unions have fought efforts to link members’ compensation to improved outcomes in their classrooms, partly because of the difficulty of tying one teacher’s efforts to student learning.
The deal between the district and the local teachers’ union, announced Wednesday, is a coup for D.C.’s aggressive schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who had long sought to inject performance criteria into teacher evaluations for her 45,000-student system.
Teachers in the D.C. system can currently make a maximum of $87,000, but under the new system, that would rise to up to $147,000.
“We’re really talking about being able to offer salaries that would compel people to become a teacher because they know they’re going to be compensated at the right level,” Ms. Rhee said.
She added that the new contract also gets rid of “ridiculous hurdles” to removing teachers who are not producing results. “If you are rated ineffective at the end of the year, you are terminated from the system,” she said.
The pact also marks a win for Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the parent union of the D.C. local.
“They just negotiated the richest deal in the history of K-12 education for teachers,” said Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps recruit teachers and advocates for performance-based teacher evaluations.
In the U.S., “the policy argument that pay for performance is anathema to teachers’ unions has been rejected here,” said Charles Barone, director of federal policy at Democrats for Education Reform, which favors stronger teacher-evaluation systems.
Mr. Barone said the deal may help other districts broach the topic with their unions.
The price tag may scare them off, though. The Washington school system is financing part of the performance-pay system with $64.5 million from four private foundations. Some school districts are likely to look at that figure and conclude that a merit-pay system can’t work without help from deep-pocketed donors.
But in D.C.,’s case, the plan calls for the private money to be gone after three years, said Eli Kennedy, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which is contributing $10 million. “We view the private money as a catalyst,” Mr. Kennedy said.
He added that since the foundation began to invest in performance-pay plans in various cities, those districts have cut budgets and streamlined bureaucracy so their programs could be sustained by public funds.
In addition, he noted that several new federal programs provide funds for precisely this approach.
Denver and Houston have merit-pay systems that began with foundation support but are now self-sustaining, according to the Broad Foundation. Houston still relies in part on federal funds, while Denver has established a permanent funding system with local public dollars.
Still, Ms. Weingarten was careful not to suggest that the deal in Washington was a model for the rest of the U.S. “This is a unique contract for a unique city,” she said in an interview.
In New York City, Chancellor Joel Klein cheered the D.C. contract as a model. But Ms. Weingarten promptly quashed prospects for replicating the deal in New York.
“Something like this cannot be done in New York City at this moment,” given the soured relationship between the union and Mr. Klein, she said.
Contract talks broke down several months ago, and Ms. Weingarten, who until last year was president of the New York City teachers’ union, said the current level of “toxicity is shocking.”
Mr. Klein countered that “it’s instructive to note that the same things she’s saying about New York City, she said about D.C., and she was able to find a way to do right for the kids.”
In February, Mr. Klein instructed principals to begin using student-achievement data in making decisions about teacher tenure, leading the local union to file a complaint with the labor-relations board.