Performance Pay Update

Districts and Charter Schools have turned in their plans to implement performance pay measures. Those proposals can be viewed here. They are all over the map – and that is a great thing! Utahns don’t lack ideas to improve public education (or passion about those various ideas), and this initiative provides a great opportunity to experiment with some of those ideas.

After the voucher vote, I’ve had many people tell me how happy or sad they were that vouchers failed. But, regardless of their position on vouchers, they often express a strong desire to figure out a way to pay the best teachers more money. Matching that desire with an appropriate and fair way to actually to do it is a huge and complex task.

Rather than have one group come up a plan, Utah will now run more than 87 separate experiments. WOW! The appropriation for performance pay measures was fairly small ($19,000,000) and very loose, intentionally providing local education leaders tons of flexibility to come up with a plan they think might work. We’ll monitor those experiments, collect the results and determine next steps.

Recently, the Utah Foundation matched parents’ gut-level reaction (“Forget vouchers. If you want to improve public education, pay the best teachers more.”) with actual data, concluding that funding increases for public education don’t produce improvement, unless those increases are tied to performance pay incentives.

The Washington County plan is quite extensive. In an off-the-charts-cool approach to this experiment, the Beaver School District had each individual school come up with an individual plan.