Indiana teachers in wealthy districts paid $2,400 bonuses. Those in poor districts got $42.

In 2013, then-Indiana Gov. – and now Vice president-elect – Mike Pence proposed a state budget item that would award public school districts and their educators annual bonuses based on academic performance and individual teacher success.

The concept, known as merit pay, was both popular and controversial at the time, and Pence, whose wife is a schoolteacher, had made education reform a top priority.

In the program’s first year, the state gave teachers deemed “effective” or “highly effective” on their annual evaluations a total of $30 million.

“Indiana teachers and schools work each and every day to make a difference in the lives of our children,” Pence said at the time in a news release. “This commitment to excellence brightens both the futures of our young people and that of our state, and I fully support, as I did on day one in office, rewarding their tireless work.”

Two years later, as Pence prepares to become Donald Trump’s vice president, his home state program is generating outrage.

The system, teachers and legislators say, is staggeringly unfair. A glance at the numbers shows why.

Last week, for the 2015-16 school year, teachers in one of Indiana’s wealthiest school districts, Carmel Clay Schools, received bonuses of $2,422.06.

Just miles away, teachers performing the same duties in a different but poorer Indianapolis-area district, Wayne Township, received checks with far fewer digits: $42.20.

“This is the difference between taking our children to dinner and taking them on vacation,” more than 50 Wayne Township teachers wrote in a signed open letter addressed to the Indiana legislature ridiculing the program, known as Teacher Performance Grants. “We have no doubt that teachers in these schools receiving bonuses work hard. We know many of them, and we hold them in high regard. A highly effective teacher in our school should receive the same bonus as a highly effective teacher in theirs.”

The teacher’s letter called their paltry $42 bonus an “insult” to the work they do every day:

It is not encouraging to know our legislators feel that our work is worth such a small amount of money. We serve in a community greatly affected by poverty and hardship, and we show up every day, and we serve every student that walks through our doors. An effective teacher in our school is worth just as much as an effective teacher in any other, and one test over only a few subjects, which the State of Indiana and the Department of Education continues to mismanage year after year, should not determine the effectiveness and worth of all of our teachers.

How did this happen? Here’s a rough explanation.

Only teachers rated “effective” or “highly effective” on evaluations get any bonus money, regardless of district. This was the case for the bonus-getting teachers in both Wayne Township and Carmel Clay Schools. Those who received $42 bonuses performed just as well as those who got $2,400.

The problem is that the total amount of money available to particular schools – the pot to be divided up among the teachers – is based on overall school performance as measured by both standardized tests and graduation rates.

Here, the schools in the less affluent districts fell short, as they do compared to wealthier schools everywhere that have more resources and students from higher income families.

So the pot available to them was minuscule by comparison and so was the pot of money to be distributed among the teachers.

As a result, high-rated teachers in the poorer districts got only a tiny fraction of the bonuses compared to the equally high-rated teachers in the wealthier districts.

Lawmakers tried to prevent this discrepancy by adding to the formula a caveat that allowed teachers in even poorly-performing schools to earn bonus money, if their graduation rates and test scores improved by just five percent.

But instead, statewide, test scores fell.

“It’s hard for anybody to think they didn’t know how this was going to turn out,” Jason Brumback, a middle school English teacher in Wayne Township and the author of the letter, told The Washington Post.

In the days since the bonus information went public and the teachers wrote their letter, some state legislators have defended the system’s reliance on scores from the state’s standardized test – ISTEP+ – and others have critiqued it, including at least one lawmaker who helped draft the formula and the incoming state Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jennifer McCormick.

McCormick told Indianapolis NPR affiliate WFYI that the bonus formula “has to be changed” and that she plans to address it in the upcoming legislative session.

One architect of the formula, State Sen. Ryan Mishler told the radio station he was shocked by the bonus disparity across the state.

“When we drafted it we didn’t think the gap would be as large,” Mishler, a Republican, told WFYI.

According to an analysis by the Indianapolis Star, it was some of the state’s wealthiest, most successful school districts this year that received the largest slice of the $40 million pie.

Urban school districts, like Indianapolis Public Schools and Wayne Township, saw much less.

Another 37 school districts, reported the Indy Star, were awarded no bonus funding at all.

That system, the Wayne Township teachers said in their note, sends a disturbing message: “… if you want to be respected and paid for your efforts, steer clear of poorer communities.”