Merit Pay For Teachers - Research Paper Example

(3) Pay for performance, or merit pay, for teachers can solve both problems. “Money plays a major role in educating America’s students,” state Kaplan and Owings in American Education: Building for a Common Foundation. “ For the 2008-2009 school year, nation-wide public education at all levels cost one trillion dollars.When it comes to quality education, we as a society can pay now or we can pay later.It is a critical investment in a community’s—and our nation’s—infrastructure.

” (Kaplan 2010) Assuming that we want to take the wiser course and pay now, thus avoiding future economic catastrophes, one of the things we need to do is to increase teachers’ salaries while also encouraging them to be more effective in the classroom. Texas Six years ago student scores at Audelia Creek Elementary School in Richardson, Texas, were among the worst in the district. More than a third of the teachers left. Now, thanks to TAP, the Teacher Advancement Program, Audelia’s students have some of the highest scores and teachers seek to work at Audelia.

TAP is a national teacher evaluation and training program that includes annual cash bonuses for high-performing teachers. Teachers of each grade level meet regularly and are led by a master teacher who trains and evaluates them. One meeting, for example, focused entirely on how to teach students to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “It’s not the sandwich, it’s the process,” the principal explained. For a teacher to know whether a student understands a reading assignment, she needs to ask the student to re-tell the material.

But that's not a process that comes naturally to many kids. So the teacher has to "pre-tell," modeling the steps that students would take to organize their thoughts in order to re-tell material they've heard. For the Richardson district, teachers who hit the minimum TAP targets get an extra $2,000. But the bonus could be as much as $3,500. Over the past two years, most of Richardson's TAP teachers got around $2,800. "It's the best teaching model I have ever seen," one teacher said. "But it's not for the faint-hearted.

" In 2010 Audelia was awarded the annual $50,000 TAP Founder's Award by the California-based National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. The State of Texas gave its blessing to districts to find their own ways to strive for excellence. District Awards for Teacher Excellence (DATE) programs were first implemented in Texas districts during the 2008-09 school year. The program is currently in its third year of operation with approximately $197 million in annual state funding. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary.

The National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University found that student achievement has improved and teacher turnover has declined in schools participating in the Texas state-funded DATE programs. Colorado Denver’s move forward in 2005 has been called both “the nation’s most ambitious teacher pay plan” and “making pure dumb luck work.” In 1990 the Board of Education first negotiated into labor agreements the formation of committees to study merit pay. There was not much enthusiasm.

On November 1, 2005, Denver voters approved a $25 million property tax increase tied to ProComp, a program of merit pay for teachers. ProCamp has four components: student growth, market