Teacher merit pay shelved

BOISE – A proposed pilot project in teacher merit pay has been dropped after the state, for the second time, lost out on a federal grant by not committing state matching funds. The project would have included one school district in Kootenai County.

“We’re done for this year,” said Senate Education Chairman John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene. He called instead for lawmakers to form an interim study committee next summer to look at teacher mentoring, performance pay and related issues.

“Once again, for the lack of $543,000, Idaho lost the opportunity for $17 million in federal funds over five years to pilot this project. … The chances were very good that Idaho could have been the recipient of the grant,” Goedde told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee on Thursday.

Senate Finance Chairman Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, said he had little choice when the state Board of Education contacted him on Monday and said he had to commit the state money right away or miss the deadline. The joint committee hadn’t even taken up the issue yet.

“There was a lot of misinformation, a lot of confusion,” Cameron said, noting that to participate, the state would have had to commit $12 million in matching funds over the next five years. The $543,000 was just for the first year.

The pilot project would have had three school districts – Lakeland in the Rathdrum-Spirit Lake area, Caldwell in western Idaho and Bonneville in eastern Idaho – give teachers extra incentive pay for meeting various objectives, while not taking anything away from those who didn’t qualify for the incentives. But Cameron said the proposal, developed by a committee of the Board of Education, hadn’t defined the objectives yet, and there were other ideas on how to reward teachers.

“I simply felt it wasn’t ripe,” Cameron said. “Superintendent (Tom) Luna hadn’t weighed in on it.”

He added, “I think the laudable goal is that we want to be able to pay good teachers more. But I think before you get there, you’ve got to have a series of meetings and discussions with teachers themselves, and decide what is the best way.”

Jim Shackelford, executive director of the Idaho Education Association, agreed. “Our thought has always been that if there’s going to be an alternate compensation system developed, then the views of the people who will be most affected – in this instance, the teachers – should be intimately involved in the discussion and decision-making.”

There also must be a commitment for funding, he said. “Those two things have been missing throughout the last few years of discussions.”

Goedde has been an advocate of “pay for performance” for teachers since he first ran for the state Senate.

“Our current system provides no incentive, other than personal satisfaction, for teachers to do any more than the least of their peers do,” he said. “I don’t mean that there aren’t teachers out there that do … but they don’t get rewards for it other than personal satisfaction.”

Shackelford disagreed. He said Idaho’s current system provides incentives for teachers to develop their professional skills and to stay in the classroom and gain experience.

“Those are two very valuable components for becoming the best professional that you can,” he said.

Ron Schmidt, assistant superintendent of the Lakeland School District, was surprised and disappointed Thursday when a reporter told him the state didn’t get the federal grant.

“That is news to me, to be real honest at this point,” Schmidt told The Spokesman-Review. “We were interested in trying to provide some added moneys for our personnel.”

Cameron said an interim committee to look into the issue “may be a worthwhile endeavor.”

Mark Browning, spokesman for the state board, said “a lot of the details had not been worked out as far as what was going to be in place to merit a teacher a raise or not.” However, he said missing out on the federal funds is “disappointing.”

“I think the lines of communication have been opened significantly in just the last little while,” Browning said. “We’ll just keep ‘em open or widen them a little more and make sure that everybody’s working together.”

Staff writer Meghann M. Cuniff contributed to this report.