Lynn Cornett and Gale Gaines, Southern Regional Education Board
2002
Incentive policies can make a difference when it comes to improving teacher quality, argues Lynn Cornett, senior vice president, and Gale Gaines, director of legislative services, at the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). Some incentives work better than others, however, and Cornett and Gaines argue for using past experience to design new efforts to attract and retain good teachers. The idea of using incentives-including performance or merit pay, scholarships, distinguished educator awards and the like-to attract new teachers or teachers of high-demand subjects or teachers for tough school situations goes back to at least the 1980s. One popular approach targeted incentives directly at teachers who were deemed to be high performers or those in subjects facing acute supply problems. Performance pay faced resistance from teacher unions, however, and by the late 1990s was no longer seen as a viable option for most states. This is not surprising, considering surveys that show up to 80 percent of teachers confident that they're among the top 20 percent performers. According to Cornett and Gaines, this history offers valuable lessons for today's policymakers as they search for ways to boost teacher quality and recruit skilled practitioners. Two messages are especially clear: 1) changing the structure of teacher work and teacher pay is almost impossible; and 2) teachers need to be involved in the development of any program that seeks to tie financial rewards to individual performance. Today, more states are turning to "whole-school incentive programs" that reward a school's entire staff for meeting school-wide performance criteria or making gains toward established targets. Showing improvement on state proficiency tests is one key measure of a school's award eligibility but not the only factor. Most states also look at a mixture of graduation rates, drop-out rates, attendance, postsecondary readiness and individual school targets. "Quality Teachers" reports that whole-school incentive programs are more apt to enjoy the support of teachers. Will this assure that every child in America has an excellent teacher? "No," note Cornett and Gaines, but they believe it's one promising strategy on the teacher quality front. To learn more, check out the report or order a copy at http://www.sreb.org/main/HigherEd/leadership/Quality_Teachers.asp.
