The recently filed House Bill 546, Alternative Salary Plans for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, is not performing as well as author Rep. Ruth Samuelson, R-Mecklenburg, originally had planned.
The bill would authorize CMS to implement a pilot program to “develop and implement alternative salary plans for instructional personnel and school administrators designed to improve student performance and increase teacher effectiveness by financially rewarding instructional personnel and school administrators through a performance-based compensation system.”
CMS Superintendent Peter Gorman was on vacation and could not answer media queries. However, Judy Kidd, the president of the Classroom Teachers Association of North Carolina, said the bill is Gorman’s attempt at a money grab from teachers.
If enacted, the program would require every teacher to put $5,000 of her salary into a pool. Those meeting performance standards would receive a $15,000 bonus. Those who don’t would lose out. Moreover, teacher performance would be measured with a slew of new tests that critics say would take valuable class time from students.
“It’s a $5,000 gamble,” Kidd said. “They will take the money from the teachers and then let them try and earn it back. They are playing games with everyone.”
Kidd also said the performance-pay plan would oppress and suppress teachers, ultimately silencing their voices in the decision-making process, as they have not been allowed to vote on the plan. She also said the additional tests tied to the performance-pay plan are flawed. “There are many questions where there are no correct answers,” she said. “They are developmentally inappropriate. It’s an exorbitant about of instructional time lost taking tests. It’s crazy. Even with 44 administrators looking at the tests, there were so many errors. It shouldn’t have happened.”
Terry Stoops, director of education studies at the John Locke Foundation, called the extra testing strategy “ludicrous.”
“It sounds like [the tests] were thrown together at the last minute,” Stoops said. “It’s one week of testing that takes away from valuable classroom instruction.”
Pam Grundy, co-founder of Mecklenburg Acts, a grass-roots coalition of concerned parents and community members, agreed. “The scores from these tests are inaccurate,” she said. “We are unimpressed by them. … [Teaching to the test] discourages the very best teachers. They are not going to be able to operate under the system and will leave CMS because they are not happy to teach to the test. The non-creative and non-innovative teachers are probably the ones who will hang on.”
Grundy said her organization does not support H.B. 546. “I’m not opposed to merit pay, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what this system is going to do,” she said. “It’s silly to me. It’s ridiculous. When you tie teachers to rigid standardized tests, then you are in a danger zone. It’s a very problematic path.”
Kidd said Gorman has been scapegoating classroom teachers. “It’s really easy to say we’ve got a lot of ineffective teachers when it’s really an ineffective administration, which he has doubled since he became superintendent,” she said. “CMS is so top heavy and he refuses to cut them and put the money in the classrooms where it belongs. The money is not filtering into the classroom.”
Kidd also said H.B. 546 would help Gorman secure $22 million in federal Race to the Top funds. “House Bill 546 is designed to allow Gorman to have carte blanche to spend the money coming in from the state that should be going to the teachers,” she said. “I contend what he is trying to do is discredit the teachers so he can take the money.”
Stoops said the bill is likely to create an unworkable performance-pay system. “We’ve supported merit pay for a long time at the John Locke Foundation, but this bill seems to do more harm than good. It seems poorly planned and poorly implemented. It hurts the classroom.”
Grundy said the real problem at CMS is the administration won’t back up the principals when they want to fire a bad teacher. Instead, they make it difficult to fire them.
Stoops said he is also concerned that there appears to be no buy-in to the new bill by the CMS constituency.
“There are a lot of people here that are skeptical of the bill coordinated by Gorman and Samuelson, without input from teachers, administrators, and members of the community,” he said. “I think the teachers have some legitimate concerns that there is economy and power being taken away from the classroom and given to the area superintendent and his office. Teachers should be concerned with the level of administrators in the CMS district office.”
Samuelson countered that H.B. 546 followed strict protocol and guidelines as it was authored and that she and Gorman worked with both teachers’ groups and parents when creating the bill.
“There’s been a lot of misinformation and people should do their research,” she said. “There is no underhandedness here, no secrecy, no subterfuge. Everyone was working on this under a very public deadline. This bill was developed under the process that all bills are handled. There was no exception in this case.”
“The battle is in Charlotte, but the war is in Raleigh,” Kidd said. “Even if it passes the House, we hope it’s a really rough road in the Senate. We’ve been lobbying the legislators and filling them with the truth, how Gorman is trying to eliminate the teacher’s voice.”
Stoops said JLF would support a pay-for-performance bill that supports several objective and subjective measures of classroom outcomes if more weight were given to the objective components.
Karen Welsh is a contributor to Carolina Journal.