I'm currently a special education teacher in a middle school.  I don't know how well performance based pay would do in a school structure.  I think it may raise a certain level of animosity between teachers in a building having a negative an opposite effect on desired outcomes.  From what I have gathered in my short number of years as a teacher is that teachers who work hard and put a great deal of effort into their delivery will and would continue to do the same, while mediocre teachers would continue to be just that mediocre.  

School based incentive pay is a much better option because it avoids the inevitable (I’d be a better teacher if I just had smarter students) conflict that happens when we attempt to measure individual teacher performance.  The best performing schools demonstrate common purpose and teamwork.  Providing schools that exceed standards or show marked increases in performance incentives makes sense.

I think we should have a performance based Congressional pay...and the way the Congressional members have NOT been doing their jobs of upholding our Constitution...perhaps they should be paying back their salaries!

Before we discuss any possible effects of performance pay, we have to be mindful about how performance will be assessed.

All the Democrats (rightly) say they are for growth-based assessment, meaning how much improvement is made.  Logically, regardless of where a student is, what matters is how much they improve.  If your student is way behind or way ahead to start, either way the goal is to have them improve, get farther.

So if I think I'm a good teacher and I'm looking for performance pay, my inclination would be to teach the more disadvantaged, where there is opportunity to make bigger gains.  This matches up with a good feeling of helping those who really need it and all that.  One of the big systemic problems is that the low performing schools/students are the least desired by teachers.

The problem though is, if we have the same kind of assessment we have today, and just scaled the results on growth, I may not really be better educating anyone.  To get the performance pay I could become a pro at doing exactly what inflates the test results, i.e. "teaching to the test."  

And this also raises the issue of short-term vs. long-term gains; if I could choose I'd choose to frame my lessons for short-term gains (for the test) while possibly leaving the students no better off for next year's material.

I'm not familiar enough with Clinton's statements on education, but I do know that Obama is basing his performance-pay stance on changing the way we do assessment. "Diverse set of assessment tools," he says. In my opinion, this is the most important issue for the next Department of Education.

In my opinion, school performance pay isn't as good of an idea as per teacher.

If I'm a teacher that feels like I'm working very hard and doing very well with my students, but the school as a whole doesn't make much gains, I am rewarded none.  I might feel unappreciated, and I would also be inclined to place blame on the failure of other teachers or the administration for this, whether they deserve it or not.

I can imagine many, if not most, teachers feeling like they are doing their part well while the school as a whole isn't making improvements.

In this light, school performance pay makes me think of just monetarized NCLB in the way it grades a whole school and affecting each teacher.

I think the only place school perfomance pay would be appropriate is for school administrators, not teachers.

Also within a single school campus, mainly high schools, there may be different clusters where somewhat different curricula are deployed, like a soft-vocationalism in the form of 'schools within a school'.  These types of organization aren't mainstream, but a school performance grade wouldn't respect differences between different clusters.

And also consider if say, the math department got well organized and have a particularly strong and smooth progression through the grade levels, and the students make consistent gains.  But for whatever reason student performance is relatively flatlined elsewhere.  The school as a whole may then be judged as making very modest progress, and bonuses come in light.  The math teachers grumble, feeling like the english teachers didn't earn the (weak) bonus they got, and feeling like they were undercut or something.

This hypothetical is more serious when considering an ESL program or special ed programs where improvement rates may be very different.  We have schools today that have in general good improvements but subsets of the school like these languishing without being seen in general report.

A note on Richardson's comment on 40k minimum:

First off these kinds of things have been take on at the state level, and honestly federal involvement would be awkward at best in intervening on this.  Would it be an unfunded mandate (not likely), or would the federal government fill in the gap (giving incentive to districts to have that gap large to milk off the fed and spend their dollars elsewhere).

Compensation comes in more forms than salary, and benefits like insurance may be cut and not really yeild a difference.

But the real problem is when you have a new teacher start at $40,000 and the teacher of 15 years is earning $43,000.  This is a real and existing phenomenon.

Typically you also have different minimums set by college degree level, going from bachelor's to master's to doctorate, which a flat minimum doesn't address.

More important is salary growth with respect to inflation.  Like the federal minimum wage, teacher salaries haven't been keeping up with inflation.  Despite occasional teacher pay increases:

"For the first time since 1982, teacher salaries are less than the average earnings of government workers, making them among the lower-paid public employees. When adjusted for inflation, real teacher pay is decreasing as private sector salaries are on the rise."
~ http://www.aft.org/presscenter/releases/2007/032907.htm

There is nothing wrong with a 40k floor, but that doesn't solve the problem.

Performance-based pay for teaching is a can of worms. It would create rifts between educators, (most are dedicated and work harder than the average public employee, taking work home and at the college level, serving on committees in our "spare" time). The entire spectrum of "how" performance would be evaluated is too big and elastic and judgmental to be a realistic option. At-risk students are at a disadvantage from the start, and it's often more than academics that causes them problems (family, economics, drugs, core issues). ESL students, as someone mentioned, reach plateaus in their learning, and achievement for them could not be fairly marked. In addition, at college level, administrators base "performance" on retention rates and percentage of revenue-generating programs of study, with minimal focus on GPAs of students. Finally, educators are offered stipends to motivate them, of course, it requires additional work but it isn't based on student performance. Just a bad idea all around.

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