Teacher Compensation Teacher Pay

Beginning in 1999, the Manitowoc Public School District and the Manitowoc Education Association entered into a new collective bargaining agreement designed to attract and retain high quality staff that also encourages and rewards the acquisition of new skills and knowledge. The plan rewards five new primary components:

School District Academy Credits
National Board Certification
Professional Development Certification
Master Teacher License
Doctorate Degrees

Six years after the implementation of the new compenstion system, this report examines its impact on teacher behavior and student outcomes.

Full Report

The Inevitable Corruption of Indicators and Educators Through High-Stakes Testing
Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner
Education Policy Studies Laboratory
Arizona State Universty
March 2005

This research provides lengthy proof of a principle of social science known as Campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." Applying this principle, this study finds that the over-relliance on high-stakes testing has serious negative repercussions that are present at every level of high-stakes testing:

Administrator and Teacher Cheating: In Texas, an administrator gave students who performed poorly on past standardized tests incorrect ID numbrs to ensure their scores would not count toward the district average.
Student Cheating: Nearly half of 2,000 students in an online Gallop poll admitted they have cheated at least once on an exam or test.
Exclusion of Low-Performance Students from Testing: In Tampa, a student who had a low GPA and failed portions of the state's standardized exam received a letter from the school encouraging him to drop out even though he was eligible to stay, take more courses to bring up his GPA, and retake the standardized exam.
Misrepresentation of Student Dropouts: In New York, thousands of students were counseled to leave high school and try their hand at high school equivalency programs. Students who enrolled in equivalency programs did not count as dropouts.
Teaching to the Test: Teachers were forced to cut creative elements of their curriculum like art, creative writing, and hands-on activities to prepare students for standardized tests.
Narrowing the Curriculum: In Florida, a fourth-grade teacher showed her students how to navigate through a 45-minute essay portion of the state's standardized exam. The lesson was helpful for the test, but detrimental to emerging writers because it diluted their creativity and forced them to write in rigid format.
Conflicting Accountability Ratings: In North Carolina, 32 schools rated excellent by the state failed to make federally mandated progress.
Questions about the Meaning of Proficiency: After raising achievement benchmarks, Maine considered lowering them over concerns that higher standards will hurt the state when it comes to No Child Left Behind.
Declining Teacher Morale: A South Carolina sixth-grade teacher felt the pressure of standardized tests because she said her career was in the hands of 12-year-old students.
Score Reporting Errors: Harcourt Educational Measurement was hit with a $1.1 million fine for incorrectly grading 440,000 tests in California, accounting for more than 10 percent of the tests taken in the state that year.

Full Report

August 2004 - Economic Policy Institute Book

How Does Teacher Pay Compare?

Methodological Challenges and Answers

National Center of Performance Incentives

The National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) is charged by the federal government with exercising leadership on performance incentives in education. Established in 2006 through a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciense (IES), NCPI will conduct independent studies on the individual ad institutional effects of performance incentives in education. The Center is housed in the Learning Sciences Institute on the campus of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

Pay-for-Performance Teacher Compensation
An Inside View of Denver's ProComp Plan
Harvard Press
By Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad Jupp

"In this book, Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad Jupp-among the key players in this successful come-from-behind campaign-offer the inside story of the ProComp initiative. They describe how entrepreneurial behavior within the teachers union and support from outside philanthropic groups propelled the plan from a cutting-edge concept into concrete policy." Harvard Press

Harvard Press