04:14 PM CST on Thursday, January 12, 2006

Associated Press

HOUSTON -- Student performance could soon be the main factor that decides which teachers make the most money in the Houston school district.

If the school board approves the plan Thursday as expected, it would make Houston the largest school district in the nation to adopt a merit pay plan for teachers.

Superintendent Abe Saavedra wants to offer teachers up to $3,000 more if their students show improvement on state and national tests. The program could eventually grow to up to $10,000 in merit pay for teachers whose students do well.

Other school districts around the country have implemented incentive pay programs for teachers in recent years. Denver adopted one in November, at the time the largest school district to do so.  Houston, with more than 200,000 students, is the nation’s seventh-largest school district.

Denver’s merit pay plan and others around the country measure teacher performance not only on standardized test scores, but on their subject certifications and other factors.

Traditionally, Houston teachers have been paid on a scale that uses their years of experience and education levels to determine pay. Starting teachers make about $36,000 a year. Salaries could rise to about $45,000 with advanced degrees and years of experience.

Texas has no collective bargaining, so the teachers union can lobby the school district for pay raises, but cannot strike if they don’t get what they wanted.

“School systems traditionally have been paying the best teacher the same amount as we pay the worst teacher, based on the number of years they have been teaching,” Saavedra said. “It doesn’t make sense that we would pay the best what we’re paying the worst.  That’s why it’s going to change.”

Saavedra is set to present his plan, which will cost $14.5 million the first year and increase by $8 million each year for the next five years, to the Houston school board Thursday. Five of the nine board members have said they support the plan.

“We have to compete for the best teachers. We don’t have enough money to compete very effectively, and so we’ve got to be creative,” said board president Dianne Johnson.

Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said the union feels the plan is being forced on employees.

“This plan is nothing but test scores. It’s not well thought out,” she said.

Monica Ramirez, a kindergarten teacher for Spanish-speaking students and the district’s teacher of the year for the 2004-2005 school year, said she supports the merit-pay plan because “the teaching profession must be based on motivation. If we are not motivated, we cannot motivate our children.”

The plan is divided into three sections, with up to $1,000 in bonus pay each as long as students show improvement in the top half of scores.

The first section would award bonuses to all teachers in schools rated acceptable or higher based on scores from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the state’s main standardized test by which districts are measured.

The second section deals with improvement by students on the Stanford Achievement Test, a standardized test that compares student performance to nationwide norms, and its Spanish-language equivalent, Aprenda.

In the third section, only teachers in the core TAKS subjects of reading and math would be eligible for bonuses, which they would receive if students show yearly progress compared to students in similar classrooms around the district.

“What differentiates this model from others around the country is this model is entirely about teacher performance,” Saavedra said. “It’s about performance and how much kids grow academically.”

But Fallon said the plan focuses too much on test scores.

“You can put test scores as part of the plan, but not the whole

plan,” Fallon said, adding that teachers should receive merit bonuses for working in hard-to-fill subjects like math or science.

Fallon said the plan is too complicated and is unfair to teachers whose subject areas don’t cover the core subjects, such as art and music teachers.

Katherine Boles, director of Professional Development Schools for the Teacher Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called incentive pay programs “dangerous.”

“Merit pay has been tried again and again in schools ... and usually it’s very badly implemented,” she said.

But Josh Greenman, a spokesman for The Teaching Commission, a New York City-based national organization focused on improving teacher quality, called efforts like the one in Houston “promising.”

“We’re in favor of paying teachers more. But we’re in favor of paying the best teachers especially more and there being a meaningful difference in what the best and worst teachers get,” he said.