Teacher merit pay debated

BOISE – A special state Board of Education committee hopes to present lawmakers in January with a pilot plan to have at least some of Idaho’s 115 school districts begin paying teachers under a so-called merit system.

The effort has created an intensifying debate over teacher compensation. Some private sector interests maintain that pay for performance fosters effectiveness by rewarding achievement – while educators, including some local school board members, object to pitting Idaho’s 14,000 teachers against one another for what already is limited cash for school district payrolls.

And one business group thinks the debate has gotten ahead of itself.

The Idaho Business Coalition for Excellence in Education, comprised of some of the state’s top business executives, is looking at how business can help improve education, and one of its committees is review teacher assessment, retention, evaluation and promotion.

Bank of Idaho President Park Price, who heads that panel, intends to bring teachers, administrators and other educators together to determine the best way to measure teacher performance before considering pay. Unlike the board committee, which wants to develop a proposal by year’s end, Price’s panel has no timetable.

“Once you have an agreement on the assessment, then you can move onto the pay part of it,” he said.

Only a few states and school districts have tried a performance pay system for teachers. But Brenda Ballantyne, a member of the state board’s committee and a former public grade-school teacher in Boise who expects to go back into the classroom, believes merit pay will improve the state’s teacher corps.

“I really think you are going to get higher-quality teachers if you pay them what they are worth and for their accomplishments,” Ballantyne said.

Joyce Baird, a high school teacher in Boise, disagrees with performance pay, saying teaching is not an assembly line and there is no clear way to measure performance.

The current pay system was developed by the Legislature in 1994 to more equitably distribute state support and in the process improve the system for covering a portion of local school district payrolls. The Legislature backed up the change with the largest single-year cash infusion into education, $92.5 million.

Under that formula, raises are determined by a teacher’s experience and educational advancement as well as when the state increases the money it puts in for its share of payroll expenses. The local school districts, however, still determine actual teacher pay scales.

Veteran Boise School Board member Rory Jones said he would not consider a merit pay plan unless teachers ask the board for it. Jones is concerned that unilateral action by the district could undermine its working relationship with teachers, who have agreed to multiyear contracts to avoid last-minute disputes as school begins each fall.

“We have the best relationship of anybody in the state,” Jones said. “If we are going to impose a merit pay plan, let’s do it in a district where they already have a bad relationship and see how it works.”

But Reed DeMordaunt, a real-estate developer who heads the state board’s committee, said the current pay system fails to acknowledge good teachers and must be modified, and he does not care whether the Idaho Education Association, the teacher’s union, accepts change.

“Who I want to convince are the teachers,” DeMordaunt said. “Whether they are part of the union or not is irrelevant to me. The union leadership may buy into it or they may not.”