Performance Pay Cluster Buck
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials are trying their best to convince the masses that a newly christened, so-called talent effectiveness project has nothing – positively, without a doubt, absolutely nothing – to do with teacher evaluation, assessments and performance pay.
That sales pitch was going great at Tuesday night’s school board meeting, until those same officials were forced to concede that the new initiative does, in fact, couple teacher evaluation, assessments and performance with pay.
The “talent effectiveness” gambit is CMS’s attempt to reboot a pay-for-performance plan officials rolled out last year with a barrage of new student tests to be used, in tandem with other measures, for evaluating teachers. It was met with nearly universal criticism from educators and parents, helped in no part by former superintendent Peter Gorman’s clandestine efforts to craft legislation allowing the scheme to be implemented without a previously assured vote of approval from teachers.
Left reeling from a backlash of protest that ensued, district officials insisted that nothing was inherently wrong with the pay-for-performance model, but rather that CMS had merely done a poor job communicating its intent and purpose.
A renewed effort was needed, officials declared, that focused less on new tests, performance assessments and paychecks, and instead highlighted how testing and development training could be used to help teachers improve their craft and bolster student achievement. In that vein, CMS is hiring two PR wizards to promote the talent effectiveness project as something that isn’t a performance pay plan, while district officials scramble to accomplish the same end.
They were at it hot and heavy during Tuesday night’ school board meeting.
“Assessment is not being done for talent effectiveness,” said CMS Human Resources Director Dan Habrat. “I will reiterate this because every time we get into this conversation we read in the press or hear on the radio that CMS is moving forward its pay-for-performance initiative by further assessing students. We misrepresented that.”
Talent effectiveness, Halbrat said, is not about performance pay.
“We already know that money does not improve performance,” he said. “The dollar doesn’t drive the behavior; development does, feedback does, being part of a collaborative team – those things drive results.”
Chief Information Officer Scott Muri delivered the same theme with a similar tone, explaining that the talent effectiveness project would include a concentrated push to solicit input from teachers while creating myriad assessment measures that could be used to improve classroom performance.
“Last year we created some confusion and tonight we accept ownership and responsibility for that confusion that we created,” Muri said. “Because assessments are not about paying teachers; assessments are about informing our teachers and our principals and all of us about teaching and learning. That’s what assessment is all about.”
Added Habrat, in case there was any doubt, “We want to make clear today that assessments and the work we are doing around formatives (tests), around summatives (tests), etc., is not about our efforts for pay for performance. It is a nice side-product, and we’ll take it if we can use it, but it is not the reason we are doing the work.”
The revamped sales pitch sailed along smoothly, until school board member Tom Tate knocked it off course with a wave of reality.
“In the attempt to divide assessment from pay for performance, I think we have actually misled ourselves in some way,” Tate said. “We were right to begin with, that we want assessment at some point to be part of that value-add to lead toward pay for performance, that there is going to be a connection.
“There is going to be one,” Tate said. “So when we say that assessment is not about that, it sounds like we’re not going to use it for that ever. Except that you have that little caveat about it may be a nice by-product.”
Faced with that stark assessment about assessments, interim superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh conceded – after CMS staffers had spent nearly an hour insisting the new talent effectiveness project had nothing to do with performance pay – that the district is still on track to, as early as 2015, pay teachers based in part on assessments and criteria related to performance.
“But it’s much greater than just about compensation,” Hattabaugh said. “It’s difficult to stay we’re just honing in on compensation.”
Doubling down on the meme, Chief Academic Officer Ann Clark offered that the new initiative was meant to focus on teacher training, career development, and meeting changing standards for student achievement.
“The initial intent is to inform,” Clark said. “It also becomes a possible measure that we can use, among many, to evaluate effectiveness.”
Responded Tate: “I get that. I just think that to suggest it isn’t about the other (performance pay) is not quite true.”
Which is entirely the point. CMS’s performance pay plan was never just about linking pay to assessment tests or teacher evaluation. From the beginning it has been about improving teacher development and training, along with other assessment tools, i.e. the tsunami of new tests, to improve student achievement, in addition to gauging teacher performance as it relates to pay. The contention that the backlash and protest was caused because critics didn’t understand that is insultingly disingenuous. They understood it perfectly fine.
The uproar was not because teachers objected to being evaluated and paid based on performance, but rather because they objected to a whole slew of pricey new tests of questionable merit that took away from valuable classroom time, along with myriad training, development and assessment schemes that did the same, which were being implemented without due consideration and feedback from front-line educators and parents.
CMS top brass say they want to fix that and, as part of the revamped launch of performance pay, are focusing more deliberately on outreach efforts to encourage teacher feedback and participation.
“The name change is part of it,” Habrat said. “We [originally] focused the conversation on the piece that we had the least interest in focusing on, which is the pay. We want 90 percent of the focus on the performance side of this conversation.”
As part of the effort, Clark said, officials are recruiting teachers to offer guidance on how to use measures like classroom observation, video footage, teacher lesson plans, student surveys and student work products as tools for evaluating and improving performance.
“I don’t think this is just repacking, renaming, or doing more of the same,” said school board member Trent Merchant.
But in a very real sense, it is; CMS recruited teacher groups last year to discuss and evaluate many of the exact same measures, something that even school board member Joe White, a leading cheerleader for the performance pay plan talent effectiveness project, acknowledged.
“It’s always been based on multiple measures,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to give the impression that accountability, assessment, growth, value-added are going away. It’s going to happen and it’s going to be there.”
In other words, despite a new name and a new PR blitz, performance pay is still performance pay.
Only now it’s called something different.
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