This week we learned that teachers at our two II/USP sites (Immediate Intervention/ Underperforming Schools Program) will receive substantial cash awards for their students’ performance on the SAT 9 for 2001. Disney Elementary teachers will receive $10,000 each and Providencia Elementary teachers will get $5,000 each. These awards are part of a $100 million incentive program authorized by the legislature under the Certificated Staff Performance Incentive program. This is one of three awards programs that were authorized by the Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999. The others are the ongoing Governor’s Performance Awards ($157 million) for use by school sites and the one-time School Site Employee Performance Bonus ($350 million) which distributed an equal amount of money for school site use and for individual site staff based on FTE.
Should we be excited about these new windfall awards to our colleagues at Disney and Providencia? On a personal level, yes. We can’t help but be pleased that several dozen Burbank teachers will receive some additional compensation for their extraordinary efforts. But extraordinary efforts have become commonplace for teachers in Burbank and throughout California. And these bonus programs only serve to further mislead the public into assuming that our teachers are being compensated adequately, and our schools are being funded properly. These are false assumptions on both counts! Further, the bonuses simply place a political "happy face" over the hard reality that teaching excellence cannot be measured by a standardized test.
According to the October, 2001 EdSource Report*, California’s national rankings are:
- 1st in number of students
– 6th in average teacher’s salary (drops significantly when adjusted for cost of living)
– 38th in expenditures per student (the lowest among the ten largest population states)
– 48th for K-12 expenditures per $1000 of personal income
– 50th in students per teacher (includes nearly universal class size reduction in K-3)
– 25% of California students are English language learners (one third in grades K-3)
Additionally, California teacher salaries rank only 43rd in percentage increase over the last decade and actually dropped 4.8% when adjusted for inflation from 1990 to 2000. California spends almost $1000 per student less than the national average — New York spends almost twice as much. To reach the national average in 1999-2000, California would have had to spend an additional $5.5 billion on K-12 education. This huge differential is mostly attributable to legislative choice, not necessity. According to EdSource, "Neither demographic changes nor a decline in personal financial well-being explains California’s relative under investment in K-12 education."
Taking the above facts into consideration, California’s teacher bonus awards are a sham and an insult to our profession. At best they are a woefully inadequate attempt to properly compensate teachers. At worst they promote a cynical assumption that teachers will teach better and work harder in order to earn cash awards. These awards are nothing more than merit pay coming in the back door. Merit or performance pay is the darling child of those who believe that the free market model must be imposed on public education. For the most part these are the same people who would give vouchers to private schools and to parents who choose home schooling. Performance pay is a bad idea for public school teachers. We achieve teaching excellence not by competing with each other, but by sharing ideas and working to improve our professional skills through collaboration. Ours is a job of preparing our future citizens to be critical thinkers and effective problem solvers. We do not make widgets on an assembly line!
We need to tell our legislators and the public to reject the phony reform of teacher cash awards and get down to the business of meaningful education reform. As CTA president Wayne Johnson said at the Presidents Conference last summer, "Real reform includes funding schools at a rate that’s higher than the national average. Real reform is class size reduction in grades K-12. Real reform is a fully credentialed teacher in every classroom. Real reform costs money. The educational pundits don’t want to pay for real reform, so they come up with phony reform."
*EdSource is an independent, not-for-profit research organization established in 1977 (www.edsource.org).