Denver teachers’ merit-pay plan is getting national attention in the race for the White House, with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama touting it last month as a way to improve schools.
The Democrat highlighted Denver’s salary plan in a speech outlining his education platform.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, however, opposes performance-based merit pay. The Democratic front-runner warns it would “open a whole lot of problems.”
Denver’s salary plan rewards educators who document student growth, improve their teaching skills and agree to work in hard-to-serve schools.
Teachers can earn a bonus of $1,026 if they meet the goals.
“Cities like Denver have already proven that by working with teachers, this can work,” Obama said.
“We can find new ways to increase pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not just based on an arbitrary test score,” Obama said.
Obama has seized on Denver’s Professional Compensation System for Teachers, known as ProComp, as a way to tiptoe through the thorny issue of merit pay for teachers, which long has been contentious for unions.
Unions in general do not support merit pay, saying it is subjective. They oppose tying pay to standardized tests and contend that merit-pay plans unfairly penalize teachers in hard-to-serve schools or those who teach courses that are not tested.
The Clinton campaign supports “school- based incentive pay,” not exclusively incentive pay for individual teachers, meaning the entire school would benefit from improvement.
Obama is carefully wording his support for merit pay, saying it should not be tied to a test and should be brought forward by teachers, not administrators.
“It’s a perfect issue for Democrats to fight over,” said Paul Teske, director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.
“Republicans will favor it without thinking about it, whereas the Democrats — because of the teachers’ union issue and its support — must find a more nuanced way,” Teske said.
“If you want to be reform-minded, this is a great idea,” said Teske, who is a co-author of “Pay-for-Performance Teacher Compensation: An Inside View of Denver’s ProComp Plan.”
“Denver showed that it can be implemented,” Teske said. “If you are getting all of this pushback from the teachers’ union, it is a tough one.”
Denver’s ProComp plan was a grassroots effort that earned support from the union and was funded by a $25 million tax increase approved by voters in 2005.
In its second year of implementation, the plan has drawn in about half of Denver Public Schools’ 4,000 teachers. Those hired after 2006 are automatically enrolled, and veteran teachers can opt in whenever they want.
ProComp is being watched nationally and has been called revolutionary because it breaks from the traditional teacher salary scale that pays based on experience and education.
Last summer, an aide for Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House education committee, called the architects of Denver’s ProComp to find out specifics for a bill that would add teacher incentives to the federal No Child Left Behind program.
Former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer is leading an effort called Ed in ’08 to get candidates to focus on education issues, including differential pay for teachers with challenging assignments.
“We’ve used ProComp as one of the illustrations on how this is being tried out and is effective,” Romer said Friday.
“ProComp is not the only way to go,” Romer said. “It is one of the very interesting illustrations that has great promise, and we need to learn from it.”
Unions have legitimate concerns about pay being tied to tests, Romer said.
“People will begin to game the system if it’s based solely on a test,” he said.
In ProComp, the teacher collaborates with the principal to set measurable expectations for students and to agree on how to assess success, the period of time in which to expect change and strategies to be used.
“It’s exciting to see Democrats taking the plunge,” said Phil Gonring, senior program officer at Rose Community Foundation in Denver, who was involved with ProComp’s development and was a co-author of the study of the Denver plan.
Obama was “opening the door” on the issue, he said. “That’s something we hoped for,” he said.
“We certainly hoped what happened in Denver would set a precedent for other states and school districts,” Gonring said.
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com
