Texas

Texas governor Rick Perry has proposed a $500 million incentive pay plan that includes giving $2,500 bonuses to teachers who raise test scores, hardship pay for teachers working in high priority districts, and extra money to schools that curb dropout rates. Critics have their doubts about the plan's feasibility. They claim that teachers cannot increase learning by being compensated like salesmen on commission and that this plan is more likely to cause increased "pressure and stress" rather than improved student achievement. More to the point, some are just skeptical that the state will ever follow through. For instance, California approved a teacher reward plan in 1999 and ultimately failed to pay them out. Texas legislators have sought to an "ironclad guarantee" to make sure that "we're not going to make the mistakes that California made," according to Rep. Kent Grusendorf (R Arlington).

Kentucky

While Texas is proposing plans, Kentucky is cutting back. The Bluegrass State is taking a hard look at its bonus pay for teachers who have earned National Board certification. Facing a $700 million budget shortfall, Governor Ernie Fletcher has proposed eliminating state funding for the program in his 2005-6 budget.

Silicon Valley

An investigative report from the San Jose Mercury News seeks to undermine the case for school district efforts to make home ownership more affordable for teachers in the notoriously expensive Silicon Valley region. In the past few years, districts in the area have employed a number of strategies such as building a subsidized housing complex for teachers. Santa Clara County is currently considering levying a $195 parcel tax on homeowners in part to pay a $2,000 annual bonus to all teachers to defray housing costs.

The San Jose newspaper surveyed homeowners and found that teachers are more likely to own their own homes than the overall workforce (66% vs. 51%). Furthermore, despite complaints of impossible commutes for teachers marooned in the hinterlands due to the housing markets, the vast majority of teachers teaching in Santa Clara County live in the county (87%). Teachers owned homes at a higher rate than software engineers, network administrators, and accountants. This said, given that the average area teacher's salary is $58,000 and an average home price close to a million, there s not much of a scandal here.

Research

States that are looking to properly tune their incentives should look at labor market research. Labor economist and NCTQ board member Michael Podgursky has a brief but useful piece on the single salary schedule for teachers in this month's Texas Education Review. Podgursky, a long-time critic of the artificial constraints that salary schedules put on the teaching profession, traces the history of the single salary schedule and reviews how it continues to hurt the profession's ability to attract people to teach in certain subjects and in hard-to-staff school districts. One of Podgursky s recommendations is that salary schedule decisions be decentralized to the district level and not decided by a state body.