State Board of Ed. to Look At Differentiated Teacher Pay

Apr 04, 2008 by Jeff Robinson

Approves Work Group at Meeting

(KCPW News) Friday morning, the State Board of Education took the first step in creating a uniform set of standards for differentiated teacher pay -- for example, performance-based pay. The board approved the creation of a work group to study the issue.

Board member Debra Roberts from Beaver County stressed the importance of having this work group begin soon, so that it has a plan to present lawmakers before they convene for their 2009 session next January.

"What we're looking at doing is something that isn't being done anywhere else in the nation," she said. "We're looking at creating standards of effective teaching and tools to evaluate those standards. That's something that's not easy, and maybe not even possible. We don't know."

In the meantime for the 2008-2009 school year, the legislature gave the board $20 million to distribute to individual school districts, which will come up with their own plans for performance-based compensation and present them to the board for approval. A board member suggested that because of this, the work group should wait until these individual plans come in to consider how to approach a uniform, statewide policy. But board member Denis Morrill from Taylorsville disagreed.

"We want to work collaboratively with the interim committee," he said. "We want to have an effect, we want to have this be a participatory thing where our committee will inform, to some extent, what they're doing. We don't want to come back after they've made some law."

The new work group will include legislators, board members and other education officials. This session, a differentiated teacher pay bill that would have given an extra $5,000 dollars to certain math and science teachers passed the state senate, but not the house.

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