The Latest Bogus School Reform

"An excellent example of education leadership," editorialized the Burlington Free Press. "Teachers' pay will grow based not merely on longevity, but on performance. Imagine - rewarding teachers for taking actions that help students succeed."

The subject of this tribute was the contract negotiated in June between the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union and its two NEA teacher union locals. Instead of paying teachers based only on years of service and education courses completed, the new contract contains a "professional growth" option.

According to Supt. William Mathis's explanatory memo, all new teachers and those current teachers electing the new option will advance in salary grade "based on developing and presenting a portfolio. This package must include their annual professional growth plans, annual summative evaluation reports, demonstrations of how they advanced school and district goals, student performance targets, and progress toward the five standards required for state relicensing."

"Student performance targets"! Imagine! Unfortunately, that is what one has to do, because this agreement to pay teachers more money has nothing whatever to do with "student performance targets", let alone students actually achieving any such targets.

To get the extra cash under the "professional growth plan", a teacher's portfolio must include evidence of "growth" in each of the five state-defined standard areas for educators. For instance, a teacher can show growth in "Learning" by taking a course or going to a workshop. She can satisfy "Professional Knowledge" by working with a colleague to produce an interdisciplinary unit. She can satisfy "Colleagueship" by serving on a district level committee, and "Advocacy" by getting grants for the school. To meet the "Accountability" standard, she can make another portfolio.

To put it bluntly, under the Rutland Northeast "Professional Growth Plan" a teacher can make more money simply by engaging in portfolio-making, grant-getting, workshop-participating, course-taking, and committee-serving, none of which has any demonstrable connection to "student performance."

That this scheme should be heralded as an important innovation tells a lot about the state of public education today. Would any private school, competing to attract students, promote itself by announcing that its teachers go to workshops, assemble portfolios, serve on committees, and perform all the other bureaucratic tasks contained in the Rutland Northeast Plan? Not too likely. What prospective customers want to know is what standards the school has adopted, and how successful it is in getting its students to achieve those standards.

The Rutland Northeast Plan, by contrast, really says this: "Our teachers can get a bigger paycheck (from the taxpayers) by engaging in a lot of activities which we education professionals assume have something to do with better teaching, and thus improved student performance, but frankly we don't have a clue whether all that stuff does anything but channel taxpayer funds to teacher trainers, occupy the time of school committees, and divert public attention from the awkward question of how much their kids are really learning."

Besides being a clever way to get more taxpayer dollars to pay teachers, the Rutland Northeast contract is yet another version of "improvement" through input management. It is the sort of "improvement" that education providers adopt when their customers (parents) have no choice about where to send their kids. A far better form of "improvement" focuses on output - what students actually learn by attending school. That kind of output-focused education is most likely to prevail where customers are free to choose the school that delivers the goods they want for their kids, and to reject schools which claim that "improvement" results from teachers making portfolios. It's probably no coincidence that, aside from the NEA, Superintendent Mathis is Vermont's most vocal opponent of parental choice in education.

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November 2000