Consortium for Education Policy Research
2002
Two recent papers from the Consortium for Education Policy Research (CPRE) explore the use of knowledge- and skill-based systems of teacher pay and ask whether these systems actually reward teachers who improve student achievement. "The Varieties of Knowledge and Skill-based Pay Design: A Comparison of Seven New Pay Systems for K-12 Teachers" (by Anthony Milanowski, October 2002) describes seven teacher pay systems in Ohio, Colorado and California. Their greatest problem is that they do not always clearly define the teacher knowledge and skills necessary to improve instruction and achievement; instead, they use surrogates like National Board certification. The author also faults these unconventional pay schemes for not aligning their measures of teacher knowledge and skills with the state standards and curricula that teachers in those states are supposed to use. "The Relationship Between Measures of Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: The Case of Vaughn Elementary" (H. Alix Gallagher, April 2002) takes a closer look at the pay system at California's celebrated Vaughn charter school (also profiled in Milanowski's report) to determine whether high ratings on teacher evaluations matched up with student gains. For the most part, finds this study, a high average rating based on evaluations by an administrator, a trained peer, and the teacher was a "statistically significant predictor" of student gains in reading; findings for math and language arts were less clear. Notably, neither state certification nor years of experience was found to be a significant predictor of student achievement. "The Varieties of Knowledge and Skill-based Pay Design: A Comparison of Seven New Pay Systems for K-12 Teachers," is available at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/rr50.pdf. For "The Relationship Between Measures of Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: The Case of Vaughn Elementary," see http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/cpre/papers/pdf/Vaughn%20TE%204-02.pdf.
