Prince William County received an $11.1 million federal grant to start a pay-for-performance program in its 30 poorest schools.
The five-year Teacher Incentive Performance Award pilot initiative — which assigns awards based on school, not teacher, performance — will be different from many merit pay plans that recent studies have found ineffective.
The Department of Education ranked Prince William’s application 11th out of 62 award recipients.
Under the plan, certified schools with 50 percent or more students eligible for free or reduced lunch must meet their annual yearly progress goals, which is how the No Child Left Behind law measures schools’ attempts toward full proficiency on math and reading exams by 2014.
Those schools then will be evaluated on 20 criteria — from test scores to students’ behavior — and ranked. Bonuses based on faculty size will be allocated to schools down the list.
Teachers who receive bonuses should expect about $1,000 to $4,500 per year, with administrators receiving up to $7,000.
Former Associate Superintendent Kris Pedersen said that when fine-tuning details, he dismissed exponential yearly increases. “You hit the reality that there isn’t an unlimited amount of money to do everything,” Pedersen said.
Pedersen said he was “absolutely not” influenced by the District’s merit pay program, but was aware that many such initiatives fail.
A recent Vanderbilt University study found that offering Nashville, Tenn., public school teachers bonuses of up to $15,000 to improve their students’ test scores produced no significant performance increases.
Barbara Klakowicz, president of the Prince William Education Association, said she opposed Pedersen’s plan, even as if she sat on the team to develop it. “People think this is going to be the silver bullet for education, but those of us who have been teaching for 26 years know, you can’t just throw money at teachers to raise scores,” she said.
Next year will be a planning year, with bonuses taking effect in the 2012-2013 school year. “We’re fighting tooth and nail” to get teacher’s assistants bonuses by then, Klakowicz said.
If successful, Pedersen said the school board would seek additional funds to continue the program.
“The money will follow the results,” Pedersen said. “That is an important difference from the typical merit pay plans that fall flat on their nose.”
