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by Joe Sullivan

In the 1980s, Knox County schools were the proving ground for the elaborate system devised by UT Professor William Sanders for assessing teacher and school performance. The building blocks for making the assessments are measures of how much a teacher’s students learn in a given school year compared to expectations for those students based on their performance in prior years. Learning gains in relation to expectations represent a teacher’s “value added,” and Sanders’ handiwork has been incorporated into the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System that’s gaining increasing national renown.

For the past decade, the state has been using it in published report cards for every elementary and middle school that grade them both on student achievement and value added scores. Some schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students that get “D” or “F” on achievement test scores nonetheless get “A” or “B” for value added. Conversely, some schools with straight A’s for student achievement get much lower TVAAS scores. Value added scores for individual teachers have also been furnished to every school district, but these scores have been kept confidential.

Now, Knox County might be on the verge of pioneering in making use of them for purposes of rewarding teachers for superior performance. County Mayor Mike Ragsdale has long been an advocate of merit pay for teachers, and on April 20, he’s due to unveil what’s being billed as a major schools initiative.

Officials who’ve been working on it are mum about what Ragsdale will recommend. But just a look at the consultants who have been involved strongly suggests that some form of performance pay based on value added will be part of it. One of them is none other than Sanders, who is now at the University of North Carolina. Another is Paul Ruiz, who is with the Education Trust, a Washington-based research and advocacy organization.

A recent Education Trust publication stresses the need to identify the most effective teachers for purposes of getting them into school settings where the need for learning gains is greatest. When it comes to the means for doing so, “easily the best example is the one that is currently up and running in Tennessee,” the publication states. As evidence that teacher effectiveness counts for a lot, the publication goes on to say that, “Some of the earliest and best analysis has been done in Tennessee, where researchers found that all else being equal, students assigned to the most effective teachers for three years in a row performed 50 percentile points higher—that’s on a 100-point scale—than comparable students assigned to the least effective teachers for three years in a row.”

While Knox County schools would be among the first in the nation to offer teachers extra pay for higher performance, Chattanooga has already taken a much-heralded step in that direction. There, teachers at nine inner city elementary schools whose reading levels were among the lowest in the state get a $5,000 bonus if their TVAAS scores exceed 115. (100 is the norm, and a score of 115 or higher is what earns an A on the state report card). Moreover, all teachers in these schools get a $1,000 dollar bonus if the school as a whole scores 115 or higher. This past year, the nine schools averaged 133.5, significantly narrowing the reading gap between them and the statewide achievement norm.

Dan Challener, president of the Chattanooga Public Education Foundation, which is sponsoring the privately funded program, stresses that the bonuses are only one of several factors that have contributed to its success. Extensive teacher training and public recognition for teachers are among the others.

The Chattanooga initiative has, in turn, gotten a lot of national recognition not only from the Education Trust but also from an august Teaching Commission comprised mainly of corporate chieftains and chaired by IBM’s retired CEO Louis Gerstner. Among the recommendations in a recent report from the commission is a call for “teacher compensation to be linked to student performance...using a variety of techniques including ‘value added’ methods that measure how much individual teachers influence learning for each child.”

So there’s a lot of impetus behind whatever Ragsdale may recommend by way of teacher performance pay based on added value here. But there are also lots of sticking points that could get in the way.

For starters, the very term “merit pay” that Ragsdale has been prone to use is anathema to most teacher organizations. Countless attempts to establish merit pay systems have been abandoned all across the country, primarily in the face of teacher opposition, primarily on the grounds that they are subjective and unfair.

“Merit pay has always foundered because of the lack of objective data, but now Tennessee has the sophisticated system that is needed to be fair,” says Kevin Carey, who authored the Education Trust’s aforementioned publication. Even so, in a recent interview on WBIR-TV, School Superintendent Charles Lindsey shunted aside a question about merit pay by saying, “Let’s talk about incentives to bring teachers to inner city schools and bonuses for top teachers.” Since Lindsey declined to talk about them with this columnist, it’s unclear exactly what he had in mind. Nor is it clear what role Lindsey is playing as a member of the working group that’s shaping Ragsdale’s recommendations. The group is chaired by the county mayor’s chief of staff Mike Arms.

In his earlier proposal for a “world-class school system” that’s seemingly gotten lost in the shuffle, Lindsey included provision for $1,000 bonuses for all teachers in a school with high value added scores. In the view of Mike Winstead, the school system’s director of research and evaluation, a school-wide approach is more equitable for several reasons than singling out individual teachers for bonuses.

For one, the value added model requires three years of performance data to establish a baseline of expectations for each student. That means only teachers at the third grade level and higher get value added scores. So individual bonuses based on them would systematically exclude kindergarten through second grade teachers. Art, music, and physical education teachers would also be excluded.

At the other end of the spectrum, value added scores for high school teachers can only be generated for the three subjects (algebra, biology, and English) on which the state conducts its Gateway exam for graduation. So teachers of all other subjects would be excluded.

Beyond that, Winstead believes that bonuses for individual teachers would tend to pit teachers against each other whereas schoolwide bonuses would get them to collaborate and create constructive peer pressure. “Teachers work in isolation too much, and a bonus system should encourage teamwork,” he contends.

The biggest obstacle Ragsdale might have to face is the Knox County Education Association. Every facet of teacher compensation in Knox County schools is the subject of a collective bargaining agreement with the KCEA. And the KCEA credo, like that of most teachers’ unions, is that all teachers are equally valuable, from which it follows that kindergarten teachers and high school physics teachers are paid the same. The only teacher pay differentials in the KCEA’s contract with the school system are for years of experience and advanced degrees.

“Performance pay or whatever you want to call it based on someone’s value added scores is just asking for a lawsuit,” says KCEA’s president Dana Stanfield. “We’ve never seen a merit pay program that’s fair.” And while she acknowledges that value added scores are valid, “teaching involves a whole lot more than just teaching to the test.” Moreover, “There are so many teachers that value added just does not affect.”

Nonetheless, Stanfield is amenable to what she calls the Chattanooga model. “The Hamilton County Education Association helped develop that program, and we’re talking to Mayor Ragsdale about trying to get something like that rolling here,” she says. “The core of the problem is keeping top teachers in hard-to-staff urban schools, and incentive pay may help.” For any broad-based initiative, though, she advocates a “pay for knowledge program where teachers would get extra pay for things like getting national board certification.” (Only nine Knox County teachers now have it.)

Its going to be very interesting to see what Ragsdale recommends on April 20 and how much funding he provides for it in his budget on May 4.

April 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 14 © 2004 Metro Pulse