Texas School Systems Try New Ways to Keep Good Teachers

I talked about the impact a good teacher can have on students. That begs the question: How do we get more effective teachers in America's schools?

We are seeing more and more evidence that school districts all over the country are trying new and different approaches, a lot of them based on performance pay.

In Houston, the school board unanimously voted to continue rewarding schools and teachers who raise student test scores. Education Week reports that this year the Houston ASPIRE (Accelerating Student Progress Increasing Results & Expectations) Award program will include "value-added" educational measurements that use multiple years of data from both state and national tests to track student progress.


This new system will allow the district to calculate value-added results for a wider group of teachers. It also contains a feature to allow teachers to track progress themselves on the Web.


We have a paper on the ED in 08 Web site that deals with value-added measurements. It's called "The Test of Seriousness: Student Achievement and Performance Based Compensation".


Up the road from Houston, in Austin, the school district is trying out a compensation plan that will allow principals and teachers at nine schools to earn performance bonuses this year. The pilot plan will include both high-achieving campuses that have high teacher retention and schools that struggle to raise student performance and have trouble keeping staff.


The program takes many factors into account when calculating bonuses, including whether or not the school is high-need; mentoring opportunities; meeting objectives on state achievement tests; meeting classroom learning objectives, and other factors.


The program will expand to 20 campuses in the 2008-09 school year and all campuses will be eligible by 2012.


These are just two approaches. There are others. The key is that, like Houston and Austin, we all need to work with teachers and administrators and find ways to place and keep our most effective teachers in front of our students.