Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Teacher pay trap

If Florida really is serious about giving teachers financial incentives to work harder, it might begin by listening to a few of those miracle workers first. Once again, though, education commissioner John Winn has driven performance pay into a standardized ditch. His bumper sticker might as well read: "FCAT or bust."

The latest meltdown, oddly enough, is with an effort called STAR (Special Teachers Are Rewarded). Well-intentioned lawmakers wrote the program into an appropriations bill last spring mainly as a way to block Winn from an administrative fiat called E-Comp.

Winn had managed to unite teachers, principals, superintendents and school boards together in collective disgust over E-Comp, which aimed to hand out teacher bonuses based almost entirely on Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores. Now, he has managed the same feat with the legislative alternative.

Winn has fought to base teacher bonuses on a test that measures student performance. In doing so, he ignores the variables in student achievement that are often beyond a teacher's control. He dismisses as virtually irrelevant the myriad job duties and functions that are constantly evaluated by school principals.

Lawmakers had intended to allow districts to consider performance measures that go beyond the FCAT, but they put Winn in charge of approving or rejecting each STAR plan. Yet as the end-of-the-year deadline looms, only a handful of the state's 67 school districts have been approved.

"There's wide agreement among all the education stakeholders that we need to rethink the current salary system," says Jim Warford, Winn's former K-12 chancellor who now heads the Florida Association of School Administrators. "But again we find ourselves with another missed opportunity because of the lack of leadership in the Department of Education and their failure to work collaboratively with districts to build consensus."

The Florida Education Association threw up its arms last week and filed a court action asking that the $147-million plan be scrapped on procedural grounds. Winn reacted predictably, attacking the teachers' union for "grasping at straws to stop this momentum."

The only "momentum" DOE can claim with its high-handed approach to performance pay is the amassing of widespread opposition. How students perform on the FCAT is indeed an important ingredient in evaluating teachers, but it can't be the deciding factor. Until these stubborn bureaucrats embrace some of the complexities of modern education policy, they can expect only more opposition.

[Last modified December 20, 2006, 21:49:50]