No.Va. schools wary of teacher pilot program Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell rolled out his teacher merit pay plan Tuesday, inviting 57 districts with “hard-to-staff” schools to apply for a chunk of $3 million in state funding for the 2011-12 school year.
But Northern Virginia districts met the governor with blank stares, as Fairfax and Arlington County officials said their schools were not necessarily “hard to staff,” and some districts echewed the Virginia Performance-Pay Incentives Initiative, which would attach students’ test scores to teacher evaluations.
McDonnell invited 169 schools — including eight in Alexandria, 17 in Arlington, nine in Fairfax, five in Loudoun and 12 in Prince William counties — to apply for funding to test a comprehensive teacher evaluation system based at least 40 percent on students’ test scores.
| Merit pay in the mid-Atlantic |
| Teacher evaluation tools that link pay to student scores are already igniting Northern Virginia’s neighbors. |
| Maryland |
| Maryland received $250 million in federal Race to the Top funding and would have given $12 million to Montgomery County — but to align with the state’s application, Montgomery would have to base 50 percent of teachers’ evaluations on student test score growth. The county declined the $12 million for the retooling, preferring its own teacher evaluation method. Prince George’s County decided to take the ride with Maryland and received $23.4 million — the second-largest allocation in the state to Baltimore’s $52.8 million. |
| District of Columbia |
| The teacher evaluation tool Impact, which bases up to 50 percent of teachers’ evaluations on student scores, has been debated since acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson developed the system as Michelle Rhee’s deputy. Mayor Vincent Gray’s education transition team said teachers view it as a sorting tool to target and fire them, while Washington Teachers’ Union officials have repeatedly decried Impact. Recent reports of possible cheating on standardized tests stirred public curiosity over the pressure that a performance-based evaluation might put on teachers to improve students’ scores. |
Districts can choose to reward all teachers in “hard-to-staff” schools or just reward specific departments, with bonuses up to $5,000.
“The results of these pilot programs will tell us a lot about the potential for performance pay to improve teacher quality and raise student achievement,” McDonnell said.
In a memo to local superintendents, State Superintendent Patricia Wright said a “hard-to-staff” school had to meet at least four of eight criteria, including a larger proportion of English language-learning students than the state average, or a high number of first-year teachers.
Fairfax County Public Schools will opt out of the program, spokesman Paul Regnier said.
“Some of these schools they have listed as harder to staff than others … they’re harder because we need particular types of teachers, like special education, but [the program] is not something we feel would be helpful to staff those schools,” he said.
Interested districts’ grant applications must be be received by June 15.
A spokesman for Arlington County Public Schools said it also did not agree with the state’s designation of “hard-to-staff” schools. “We will be reviewing it over the next two months” before making a decision, Frank Bellavia said.
While Loudoun County Public Schools officials will consider applying, the program is “really not applicable to us,” spokesman Wayde Byard said.
“Our schools tend to expand really rapidly, so in [some cases] we hired more teachers this year because some schools doubled in population, so it’s not as it appears with us,” he explained.
Prince William County Public Schools is wrapping up the planning year of its five-year, $11.1 million merit pay program funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Spokesman Ken Blackstone said he was not sure how the district’s Teacher Incentive Performance Award initiative, starting in 30 schools, would coincide with the governor’s proposal.
“We’re just receiving this information and we’ll certainly be looking to see how we can benefit from it,” Blackstone said.
Alexandria City Public Schools officials were not available for comment.
