Houston ISD (HISD) officially threw its hat into the performance pay ring January 12 when its board unanimously approved a plan that could net teachers as much as $3,000 more per year based on how well their students perform on state and national standardized tests.

With 210,000 students, HISD is the largest school district in the country to adopt a performance pay plan. It overtook the Denver, Colorado, school district, which approved a performance-pay system last November.

The contrast between the approaches taken by Denver and Houston is striking. Denver more or less tiptoed into performance pay, developing and pilot testing its plan over a six-year period and launching it January 1, 2006. Houston, on the other hand, took a bold leap, with Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra constructing and the HISD board approving a plan in less than a year.

In a news story on HISD’s Web site, Saavedra said changing the way teachers are compensated is necessary for the district to see continued student achievement gains. “We cannot continue to pay every teacher the same, solely on the basis of how many years they have been on the job and regardless of what kind of job they do in the classroom,” Saavedra said.

The HISD leadership team has budgeted $14.5 million to get the program off the ground. It plans to build up bonuses significantly over time to provide a “financially meaningful and…genuine incentive,” the Web site declares. If all goes as planned, teachers might be eligible for as much as $10,000 a year in performance pay.

What brought performance pay to the top of the district’s “to do” list? Simply put, the leadership team believes it’s the right thing to do.

“I don’t think there’s anything more unfair than some of the ways we reward teachers now,” said HISD Trustee Dianne Johnson. She served as board president while HISD’s plan was developed. “I don’t think there’s anything fair about the most effective teacher and the least effective teacher making the same thing,” Johnson said.
 
“Bite-sized” efforts benefited fewer teachers

Johnson said that for a few years, the district “did bite-sized things” to try to improve student performance. The results weren’t significant.

By 2005, HISD had a bonus system for teachers in place, albeit a modest one. Teachers at schools that were rated “Exemplary” or “Recognized” by the Texas Education Agency earned bonuses. The approach took into account the team effort that goes into improved student achievement, but had a noteworthy downside: excellent teachers at lower-performing campuses were not eligible for bonuses.

“We have some really strong teachers in low-performing schools and we don’t want to provide them with an incentive to move to a higher-performing school when they are needed where they are,” Johnson said.

The board believed that more substantial change was needed. Even so, it took awhile for everyone to unite behind the idea of changing teacher pay. “I don’t think everyone felt the same way when we started the discussions by a long shot,” Johnson said. After some board workshops and an open exchange of ideas, the board agreed to try performance pay.

Saavedra requested funds to get the ball rolling last June. The board set aside $14.5 million, and though they weren’t exactly sure what a performance pay plan made for Houston would look like, they knew that they had taken the first step.

The initial plan was developed by Saavedra and reviewed by teachers, principals, and the community to get input. “We changed things all along the way based on the input we got,” Johnson said. In the end, they came up with a plan that rewards both individual and team effort.

More bang for more bucks

Under the new plan, the district projects that the number of teachers receiving bonuses will more than triple. The district will still reward all teachers in high performing schools. The effectiveness of teachers of core subjects will also determine who gets a bonus.

“We’ve tried to embrace what’s good about the team concept, but the real change that’s making headlines across the country for HISD is that [the plan] rewards teachers at the classroom level and uses a value-added model,” Johnson said.

Value-added models focus on the year-to-year progress of students rather than setting a finite threshold for student achievement. Teachers that make the most progress with their students compared to other, similar groups of students will earn a bonus.

Using spring 2005 student achievement data and school-rating results, the district compared the two plans. The old plan would have awarded more than $2 million to 2,077 teachers in 48 schools. Under the new plan, more than $6,500,000 would be spent to reward 6,853 teachers in 274 schools.
 
The new plan includes the following three strands:

• The first strand rewards teachers based on the school’s improved scores on Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading and math tests. The district will compare each school to 40 other schools around the state with similar demographics. All teachers in schools that show the most improvement will receive rewards.
• The second strand rewards teachers for improved student test scores on the Stanford 10 Achievement Test or Aprenda, an equivalent test for Spanish-speaking students. Those who teach core subjects earn bonuses if their students make more progress from the previous year than students in similar HISD classrooms. Teachers that don’t teach core subjects can earn a bonus if the school as a whole makes more progress on the tests than other comparable HISD schools.
• The third strand rewards core teachers for year-to-year progress on the TAKS reading and math tests. Core teachers whose students haven’t taken the tests in previous years (for example, third- or fifth-grade science teachers and eighth-grade social studies teachers) earn a bonus if their students make more progress on TAKS than the school’s students made the previous year. Teachers of non-core subjects are not eligible for this bonus.

Teachers of core subjects are eligible for rewards in all three strands. They can earn the full $3,000. Teachers of non-core subjects are eligible for rewards in the first two stands. The biggest bonus they can earn is $1,500.

As an additional incentive, teachers that earn bonuses and also have perfect attendance will see their bonus increase by 10 percent. Teachers that earn bonuses and miss two days or less will get an additional 5 percent.

Administrators can also earn bonuses based on the number of teachers on their campuses earning bonuses. Principals can earn a maximum of $6,000 in bonus pay and regional superintendents can earn as much as an additional $25,000. Administrator raises are tied to teacher raises, so the better teachers fare, the better principals and superintendents fare.
 
Answering the critics

Johnson said the majority of teachers and all the parents she’s spoken to support the plan. At the same time, she acknowledges that it’s a controversial change.

The plan’s critics focus on three things: its heavy reliance on test scores, the difference between what core and non-core teachers can earn, and the sentiment that all teachers need pay raises.

Johnson is comfortable with the plan’s reliance on test scores in spite of teacher objections. “I would like to live in a world where we didn’t have to test, but one of the things we were very cognizant of is that we had to use objective measures,” Johnson said. Test scores certainly provide the kind of hard data that districts can measure, and HISD is attempting to ensure objectivity by focusing on student progress to make its pay decisions.

The biggest objection to the plan comes from teachers of non-core subjects who aren’t eligible for the same size bonus as core-subject teachers. Johnson acknowledges that the disparity is a problem.

Still, she said, teachers that can’t earn the biggest bonuses often support the idea of performance pay. They’d just like to see the plan expand. “What I hear is, ‘I teach Spanish. How can you get me on it, too?’” Johnson said.

“I think one of the limitations of this plan is that we don’t have objective measures in all disciplines, so we’re limited by those that we have,” Johnson said. “That said, I really think it’s important for education to go down this road, and I think we’ll get better at isolating other objective measures to come.”

Houston teacher organizations, particularly the Houston Federation of Teachers, say the money that is set aside to pay bonuses would be better spent on across-the-board pay raises for teachers. Starting pay for Houston teachers does lag behind many other Region IV districts.

Still, the district has provided consistent pay raises to teachers—in the three to four percent range since 2001, according to data collected for TASB/TASA Salaries and Benefits in Texas Public Schools—and plans to continue increasing its base salary to compete with other area districts.

Johnson believes the bonuses will serve a purpose that smaller salary increases can’t. They could help the district retain its best teachers. “We are dealing with a shortage of resources,” she said. “We have lots of good people who leave the profession to go into another profession. We have to compete.”
 
Testing the waters

HISD’s performance pay plan goes into effect immediately, with the first bonuses awarded to teachers after this year’s performance results are in, probably sometime this fall.

Houston and Denver are sure to get more than their fair share of attention from the stakeholders in the education world. Whether or not the plans get immediate results, Johnson believes its time to try something different.

“Even though it’s not a perfect plan, it is a pioneering plan that starts us down this road,” Johnson said. “The end result is it rewards good teaching wherever we find it.”