Students in schools not meeting federal improvement guidelines deserve help.
State Sen. Nathaniel McFadden wants to give it to them ? in the form of a law granting a $1,500 per year tax credit to new math, science and special education teacher hires, some of the most difficult to attract, who choose those schools.
While his heart may be in the right place, studies show such incentives do little to retain teachers. And Maryland needs help in that regard. All 24 of Maryland?s local school systems report teacher shortages.
Common sense says after those three years are up, what benefitswill those teachers receive who chose the lowest performing schools? What will stop them from moving to a better environment?
What is really needed are structural reforms to the system that combine incentives to come with proven retention strategies.
The National Institute for Excellence in Teaching designed the Teacher Advancement Program just for that purpose. The program “provides teachers with powerful opportunities for career advancement, ongoing professional development, a fair accountability system and performance pay.”
More than 130 schools across the nation ? with 60,000 students and 4,000 teachers ? have embraced the program, started in 1999. It?s in 14 states, not including Maryland, and Washington, D.C. One of the best things about it is that faculty must vote to start TAP, so only those who want it try it.
How has it worked? A new study from NIET (www.talentedteachers.org) shows the teachers, who have to vote for the program to start, and schools adopting TAP achieve significantly greater student performance growth than teachers not in TAP schools.
Chattanooga, Tenn., found adopting those types of reforms helped the school district attract and keep high-quality teachers who had fled the system previously.
Of course, students in failing schools deserve a choice to stay or leave in the form of vouchers.
But if McFadden and the state legislators really care about improving failing public schools over the long-term, they must not waste time on Band-Aid measures.
He should withdraw the bill. Instead, he should call State Schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick and discuss with her how Maryland schools can apply to be TAP schools and how they can help to organize funding for the program, which costs about $200 to $400 per student.
And The Greater Baltimore Committee, which testified in support of the bill, must use the considerable clout of their 500-member companies to lobby in support of TAP partnerships and to raise private sector donations for it.
Anything less means those low performing schools will, at the minimum, face the prospect of a big staffing hole every three years.
