Houston school board approves merit pay plan

The $14.5 million program is the nation’s largest merit pay program. Teachers could receive bonuses of up to $3,000 a year and senior administrators could receive up to $25,000 during the first year of the program.

Board President Diana Dávila calls the plan “a bold move to create a more fair performance-pay plan.”

“We have always said in public education that experience matters,” says board member Harvin Moore. “And it always has, and still does. Now we are recognizing and saying that effectiveness matters, too, when it comes to educating students. Our challenge in the HISD is finding ways of attracting and retaining our best teachers.”

Houston business leaders lauded the plan. But unlike Denver, where the teachers union worked with school district leaders for years on a merit pay plan, the Houston teachers union opposes merit pay.

“No one has been able to show us one ounce of research that paying teachers for test scores improves performance,” says Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. Instead, she prefers a plan that would raise teacher salaries across the board. The starting salary of a Houston teacher is $36,050.

Houston has had a program since 2000 awarding bonuses for teachers at high-performing schools, but the new program also rewards teachers for the success of their own students.

The plan contains three different strands of incentive pay:

• The first strand rewards teachers on the basis of how well the school has improved on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) in reading and math when compared with 40 other schools around the state with similar demographics. All teaching faculty and non-instructional staff members on the campus are eligible for this performance pay.

• The second strand is based on improvement of individual children on the Stanford and Aprenda tests. Core teachers -- those who teach children in the core subjects tested on those tests -- will earn bonuses if their students made more progress from the previous year than students in most similar classrooms in Houston.

Teachers who don’t teach students in the core subjects will earn smaller bonuses if students on the campus make more progress on Stanford or Aprenda than students in schools across Houston with similar demographics.

• The third strand will reward core teachers for progress from one year to the next in reading and math on the state assessment.

As an additional bonus, teachers with perfect attendance will have their earned performance pay increased by 10 percent, and teachers who have missed no more than two days will have their earned performance pay increased by 5 percent.