 $6,250 that the district offers to its “master” teachers, who take a leadership role among the faculty, and the bonuses averaging $3,400 to teachers who exhibit outstanding classroom performance and student achievement.
The traditional K-12 compensation system is obsolete in that it is no longer useful, but, sadly, it is not obsolete, because it is still in use.
The Teacher Advancement Program
For the past four years, the Milken Family Foundation, founded in 1982 and based in Santa Monica, California, has been working through its Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in Madison and in more than 60 other schools–mostly elementary and middle schools and a few high schools–around the nation to change the way teachers are evaluated, helped to grow professionally, and compensated.
The TAP is a systemic reform of public schools intended to attract, motivate, develop, and retain high-quality talent in the teaching profession. It has four key elements:
- Multiple career paths allow teachers to pursue a variety of positions throughout their careers–career, mentor, and master teacher–depending on their interests, abilities, and accomplishments. As they move up the ranks, their qualifications, roles, and responsibilities increase–and so does their compensation. When teachers take on more responsibilities, they should receive more pay. The old career ladder programs failed because the best teachers were honored with new titles and more work, but with meager, if any, extra pay.
- Performance-based accountability evaluates teachers’ effectiveness through a comprehensive, research-based system that combines such criteria as position responsibilities, classroom observations, and students’ gains in test scores.
- Ongoing applied professional growth requires a change in the school schedule that allows time during the regular school day for teachers to learn, plan, mentor, and share with other teachers so they can constantly improve the quality of their instruction.
- Market-driven compensation allows schools to compensate teachers on the basis of their performance and the performance of their students.
Attracting–and Keeping–Effective Teachers
One of the things we all seem to know is that there are few careers, except teaching, in which professionals are not held accountable for their failures and rewarded for their accomplishments. So why, political constraints aside, do we insist on giving raises to reward a teacher’s longevity instead of his or her job performance?
For the past 17 years the Milken Foundation has worked with state superintendents to recognize and reward K-12 educators with a $25,000 gift–no strings attached–for outstanding and effective performance. Of the 1,977 recipients of the Milken award, we know that 1,653 of them are still working. Of these, 281, or 17 percent, have left their school buildings to take jobs at a district office (154), a nonprofit organization (47), a university (41), a federal or state government office (24), or a private company (15).
Unfortunately, we do not know whether this 17 percent turnover among Milken award recipients is better or worse than among those equally experienced and outstanding teachers who do not receive the awards. But we do know that 46 percent of all teachers leave the profession in the first five years and that, anecdotally, the Milken awards have created an aura of excellence about the profession that enhances the environment that our TAP research shows is so important to teacher retention. The very fact that these teachers have opportunities beyond the classroom increases the attractiveness of the profession as a whole.
However, when no compensating salary is awarded for teaching in difficult or undesirable schools, it is easy to understand why the best teachers may choose to teach in the most rewarding and pleasant environment available, moving from low to high socioeconomic status schools when the opportunity arises. Extra compensation is thus needed for those teaching in hard-to-staff schools where conditions are difficult, dangerous, or unpleasant. Defying that pattern,