Performance Pay: Arizona
Retaining Effective Teachers Policy
Analysis of Arizona's policies
Arizona supports a performance pay initiative. The state's
Career Ladder Program provides teachers with opportunities for advancement
based on "improved or advanced teaching skills, evidence of pupil academic
progress and higher-level instructional responsibilities."
The program requires that the placement of teachers on the Career Ladder be
based on more than one measure of performance, including increasingly higher
levels of student academic progress, the use of various methods of progress
assessments by local districts and procedures for review of student progress.
The restructured salary schedule must be based on performance and not on
experience and education. However, this program will be repealed in July 2015.
Recommendations for Arizona
Continue to support a performance pay plan that recognizes teachers for their effectiveness.
Arizona should continue to support performance pay after its current initiative ends. Whether it implements the plan at the state or local level, the state should ensure that performance pay structures thoughtfully measure classroom performance and connect student achievement to teacher effectiveness. The plan must be developed with careful consideration of available data and subsequent issues of fairness.
State response to our analysis
Arizona recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis.
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Arizona
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Delivering Well Prepared Teachers
- Admission into Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Reading Instruction
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Mathematics
- Middle School Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation in Science
- Special Education Teacher Preparation
- Assessing Professional Knowledge
- Student Teaching
- Teacher Preparation Program Accountability
Expanding the Pool of Teachers
Identifying Effective Teachers
- State Data Systems
- Evaluation of Effectiveness
- Frequency of Evaluations
- Tenure
- Licensure Advancement
- Equitable Distribution
Retaining Effective Teachers
Exiting Ineffective Teachers
Pensions
Research rationale
Performance pay is an important recruitment and retention strategy.
Performance pay provides an opportunity to reward those teachers who consistently achieve positive results from their students. The traditional salary schedule used by most districts pays all teachers with the same inputs (i.e., experience and degree status) the same amount regardless of outcomes. Not only is following a mandated schedule inconsistent with most other professions, it may also deter talented individuals from considering a teaching career, as well as high-achieving teachers from staying in the field, because it offers no opportunity for financial reward for success.
States should set guidelines for districts to ensure that plans are fair and sound.
Performance pay plans are not easy to implement well. There are numerous examples of both state and district initiatives that have been undone by poor planning and administration. The methodology that allows for the measurement of teachers' contributions to student achievement is still developing, and evaluation systems based on teacher performance are new in many states. Performance pay programs must recognize these limitations. There are also inherent issues of fairness that should be considered when different types of data must be used to assess the performance of different kinds of teachers.
States can play an important role in supporting performance pay by setting guidelines (whether for a state-level program or for districts' own initiatives) that recognize the challenges in implementing a program well. A few states now require that districts build performance into salary schedules, moving away from bonus structures that teachers know may be subject to budget constraints and competing priorities.
Performance Pay: Supporting Research
Research on merit pay in 28 industrialized countries from Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance found that students in countries with merit pay policies in place were performing at a level approximately one year's worth of schooling higher on international math and science tests than students in countries without such policies (2011).
Erik Hanushek found that a teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates $400,000 in student future earnings for a class size of 20. See E. Hanushek, "The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 16606, December 2010.
In addition, numerous conference papers published by the National Center on Performance Incentives reinforce the need to recognize the limitations and appropriate uses of performance pay. See: http://www.performanceincentives.org/.