What DC and Dallas are doing right about teachers' pay

Washington Post -  It’s the near-universal approach of the 13,000 public school districts in the United States to pay teachers on the basis of experience and extent of graduate education — not position or performance. This might not be so objectionable — except for the disquieting fact that teacher salaries then end up being virtually unrelated to effectiveness in the classroom.

After more than 50 years of calls for improvement in U.S. public schools, this needs to change. And two district school systems demonstrate one way to do it.

In 2009, under the leadership of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Washington implemented the IMPACT program — a revamped teacher evaluation system that is linked directly to classroom effectiveness and that provides large increases in base salaries for the most effective teachers and dismissal for the least effective. This program has shown that focusing on student learning is rewarded with improved student performance, and that student-focused incentives work.

Dallas provides a second example of the power of changing the focus of teacher pay to student performance. Under the leadership of then-Superintendent Mike Miles, Dallas in 2015 switched to a salary system based on a sophisticated evaluation of teacher effectiveness. It then used this system to provide performance-based bonuses to teachers who would agree to go to the lowest-performing schools in the district. Two things happened: First, the best teachers responded to the incentives and were willing to move to the poorest-performing schools. Second, within two years, these schools jumped up to the district average.

And yet such performance-related reforms have not caught on in the rest of the nation’s schools. That’s because, although it professes to foster learning, our school system is not structured in a way that encourages most districts to seek out or implement changes that systematically lead to better student performance. It is both compliance-based and a fierce defender of existing personnel and operational structures.