Razzle Dazzle: Will Teacher Bonus Matter?

Razzle Dazzle:
Will Teacher Bonus Matter?


Mayor Bloomberg needed an incentive program to attract good Teachers to struggling schools. United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten needed legislation to allow Teachers to retire at full pension five years earlier, and wanted to get her most-senior members a long-deferred payment without an extended court battle.

The meeting of those needs produced the Oct. 17 press conference at City Hall to announce what the Mayor hailed as "a breakthrough, one that will allow us to launch the nation's largest program for rewarding Teachers in high-needs schools."

The program, Ms. Weingarten emphasized, was a school-wide bonus initiative rather than the garden-variety merit pay structure that trade unions have long opposed. Even doing it on the union's terms was surprising enough that she began her remarks by saying, "Today is a day that probably most of you in the press thought would never happen."

Bucking Conventional Wisdom

Mr. Bloomberg also acknowledged that it went against expectations, noting that it was generally believed that this sort of innovation was unlikely to occur in big cities with strong unions.

Mayor's Photo Unit/Spencer Tucker HOPING IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE: Mayor Bloomberg, explaining the school-wide bonus program while flanked by Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, said he believes it will attract and motivate Teachers in high-needs schools. 'Everybody wants to feel that they're contributing, but they still have families and they still have to eat and they still want to take a vacation,' he said. "Randi and the UFT have proved the conventional wisdom wrong," he said.

On the other side of the coin were the UFT delegates who feared this was the end of the world as they knew it, either because they believed the program would divide Teachers or due to concerns that it would add even more momentum to improving test scores at the expense of true learning.

The philosophical musings overshadowed the real bottom-line concern: will the payment of bonuses averaging $3,000 per Teacher to those in high-needs schools that show measurable academic gains improve the quality of teaching there?

Mr. Bloomberg, asked whether $3,000 was enough of an inducement for Teachers to leave a comfortable situation in a good school, insisted it would be for some.

"I think Teachers want to be challenged," he said. "I think Teachers in the past were afraid to go into some of the high-needs schools because crime was rampant. That's no longer the case."

Ms. Weingarten also predicted the money was attractive enough, saying, "It is a significant sum on top of what has already been a 43-percent increase in salaries" since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002.

The view from past and present educators was strongly at odds with those assessments, however.

One of them, who applauded the concept of "paying a differential for more difficult work," contended that the added money wasn't nearly enough, particularly because the sharp reduction in crime on the city's streets has not been reflected in many high-needs schools.

"The reality is," he said, "that a Teacher that gets placed in a failing school, in many cases the first year they're bolting. The statistics on increased violence in the schools shows that it is not subsiding in many places. If they're frightened about walking into the classroom every day, or walking the halls or staying after school - especially this time of year when it gets dark earlier - I don't think $3,000 is going to turn the corner for them."

'They Want a Learning Environment'

He continued, "Good Teachers really want to be in a learning environment. There's too many kids in those schools who go there to hang out, not learn, and it affects the entire school."

One high school Teacher, in explaining what prompted her to leave a Brooklyn school that while it has slipped over the past 20 years is not in the high-needs category, fleshed out the problem.

"It was going downhill," said this Teacher, a veteran of more than a decade in the system who like others interviewed asked that they not be identified. "There were kids setting fires just to be disruptive - the school had to be emptied for a couple of hours while the fires were dealt with, and you lose that instructional time.

"I needed a change," she continued. "I felt I wasn't going to be given the opportunity to grow," something she found when she transferred to a new school in Manhattan whose Principal came there with a strong reputation for nurturing staff.

The bonus might prove attractive, she said, for "someone that maybe is in a bad school that isn't high-needs. They may switch because they'll figure, 'At least I'm getting more money.' But if you're in a good school, I don't know why, unless you were a missionary personality, you would leave to put up with the stress. For somebody that's happy where they are, I don't know if $3,000 is enough to make you move - even the younger Teachers who tell me they aren't contributing to the [UFT Tax-Deferred Annuity] because they can't afford it. And if you're going to be at maximum, at $100,000, then what's $3,000?"

The best the incentive program could hope to do, she said, was prompt new Teachers to work in the designated schools. Without a strong cadre of veteran Teachers, however, the energy and idealism of the new instructors might dissipate once they confronted the obstacles that are part of the past history of those schools.

One retired junior high-school instructor - who made the move to a longtime problem school in Coney Island three decades ago not for more money but because it became a "magnet school," with a gifted and talented program that attracted students from other parts of Brooklyn - doubted the money would be a strong inducement.

'Tough in Good Schools'

"There are jobs that pay a lot more without the aggravation," she explained. "It's very tough to teach in a hard school; it's not easy teaching in a good school."

If their perceptions are accurate, top-caliber Teachers are not going to be lining up to transfer into the high-needs schools. The Mayor may believe that even a trickle of movement towards those schools could transform their cultures, or that the collaborative nature of the bonus program could create an esprit de corps among the staffs that would make a difference without a major turnover of personnel.

"When a school works as a team, when Teacher voices are respected, that's how schools work," Ms. Weingarten told reporters.

In a subsequent phone interview Oct. 19, she acknowledged that the $3,000 bonus may not be enough to have a major impact.

"I don't know if it will attract people to high-needs schools," she said. "I do know that school-based incentives and collaboration in a respectful fashion will promote a far more cooperative school where people will work through problems."

She continued, "The city wants to test whether money matters. Money will play a part, but I think it plays much more of a part as a predictable salary increase."

Other Proposals

Ms. Weingarten had previously proposed other incentives for luring Teachers to high-needs schools, including allowing them to transfer in a group, creating a differential that would pay them to make the move even before the impact on the school could be measured, and reducing the student-to-Teacher ratio by 20 percent in those schools' classrooms.

Although the UFT has been able under a prior contract to keep Teachers employed as permanent subs in cases where their schools are closed and they don't immediately find full-time jobs elsewhere in the system, she said one drawback to the new system may discourage Teachers from gravitating to high-needs schools.

There are 35 Teachers from Evander Childs High School who have not been placed elsewhere since it began phasing out of existence due to academic failure, and Ms. Weingarten suspects that they are regarded by some schools as damaged goods because of that school's persistent woes. Their fate becomes a cautionary tale as to what might happen if a Teacher leaves a school with a good performance record for a struggling school that is ultimately closed because it doesn't improve.

"If they solved that problem," she said, "I think more people would say, 'I'll take a risk' and go to the high-needs schools."

Political Asset for Mayor

From Mr. Bloomberg's standpoint, at the very least, the program makes sense if he has an eye on his legacy as Mayor, or if he actually runs for President; even if the results are not conclusive within the next year or two, he can claim credit for a potentially significant change aimed at the schools which until now have seen at best minimal improvement.

He told reporters, "Graduation rates have really gone up 20 percent, no matter how you measure it. So have math scores." But while education in some neighborhoods has been transformed by moving students into new, often-smaller schools, in many poorer areas of the city, the problems have resisted the best efforts of the administration.

And so while Schools Chancellor Joel Klein framed the agreement as "the first time in our city we're going to directly tie a portion of Teacher compensation school-wide to student performance," the UFT leader emphasized a different precedent being set.

"This city's administration has never looked at Teachers as co-equal partners on a school-based level," she said following the press conference. "They will tell you that they've tried everything. What they've never tried is treating Teachers as professionals."

One Salary Fits All?

Ms. Weingarten figured to face some resistance to the agreement within her union, even though the committees deciding how to allocate the bonuses will include two UFT representatives, along with a school's Principal and his or her designee. Any deviation from an equal division of the bonus money will upset those within the union who claim that even if favoritism doesn't color the decisions, it is harmful to morale to give some Teachers bigger bonuses at the expense of others.

There is something inconsistent, however, in Teachers on the one hand wanting to be treated as professionals and at the same time insisting that they should be treated no differently than factory workers in terms of compensation. In most schools, it would not be hard to find a consensus about the few Teachers who stand out even in a good cadre, or about the few who are below average.

And paying everyone identically has not been a motherhood issue for the UFT for more than two decades, notwithstanding the union's opposition to having a Principal make unilateral decisions on which Teachers should get bonuses.

Klein Invokes Shanker

Mr. Klein, in praising Ms. Weingarten for having "made Al Shanker's vision a reality," was alluding to the late UFT leader's position as head of the American Federation of Teachers in favor of school-wide incentives, which he deemed far fairer than individual merit pay.

Ms. Weingarten said that the Breakthrough for Learning program that was tried on an experimental basis in Brooklyn during the late 1990s featured an awards committee that "was very much management-dominated ... the collaboration was missing."

City Comptroller Bill Thompson, who was President of the old Board of Education at the time, agreed, saying the new setup "creates a better school community" because it will be perceived as a fairer process for allocating the bonuses.

The more worrisome question for Ms. Weingarten is whether the program will further accentuate what she believes is an overemphasis on "high-stakes testing," and lead her members to embrace that mentality because there is money attached to it.

She responded that the progress reports that will be used to measure whether schools have made sufficient strides to warrant the bonuses "have a bunch of other factors" that are considered, although the biggest portion of the evaluation stems from test scores.

Have Option to Kill

Speaking to reporters afterwards, she noted that 55 percent of the Teachers in a school have to vote for the bonus program for it to be utilized. "If people feel that somebody in a school is really focused on test scores, test scores, they'll kill the program," she said.

UFT labor counsel Basil Paterson said that having Teachers on the committee would be a safeguard against individual Teachers trying to inflate their bonuses by gearing instruction strictly to test performance. "They're going to know who's teaching to the test," he said.

The pension changes address key needs for Ms. Weingarten involving two distinct groups of her members. The supplemental payments amounting to $160 million spread among about 40,000 active and retired Teachers affect members of Tiers 1 and 2 of the pension system whose contributions became higher than needed beginning in mid-1977, when the assumed earnings rate for the Teachers Retirement System was increased from the original 4 percent to 5.5 percent. (It subsequently was bumped several more points during the 1980s when a robust stock market pushed earnings even higher.)

25/55 Boon for Vets

Those hired after mid-1976, who therefore belong to Tier 4 of the system, are the beneficiaries of the Bloomberg administration's agreement to support legislation permitting them to retire on full pension at age 55 if they have 25 years' service, compared to the current requirement of 30 years in the system. That gain, which is dependent upon those Teachers contributing an additional 1.85 percent of their salaries toward their pensions, is particularly good for more senior Teachers, since the additional contributions are not retroactive.

Those sweeteners overcame any misgivings UFT delegates might have about the biggest part of the package - the school-wide bonus program. Ms. Weingarten said she knew it was those gains that prompted the standing ovation she got when she came before her delegates a couple of hours after the announcement, not the bonuses.

"What I love about my members is they're not shy," she said regarding the objections some delegates voiced. "But this is not traditional merit pay. This is controversial, but it would have passed even without the 25/55."

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