December 15, 2005


Interest builds in Minnesota's new teacher pay plan
Norman Draper, Star Tribune
Supporters say Q Comp, which stands for Quality Compensation for Teachers, is needed to boost student performance. The idea is to compensate teachers for their work in the classroom, rather than their years of experience and the graduate school credits they accumulate. It also is designed to make teaching more attractive to talented young people, by allowing them to make more money faster than they can now

On my other web site-School Doc-I have been highlighting various alternative pay programs for teachers, trying to distinguish them from the traditional notion of “merit pay”. The latter usually leaves the pay scale in place but gives bonuses to those teachers who are deemed more effective. The alternatives-Denver, Casa Grande, AZ, and now Minnesota scrap the salary based on degrees and years of experience and instead establish a base line-index- for each teacher and provide “index bonuses” based on what the teacher does in a specific year. In Casa Grande most of the teachers received bonuses and the Denver plan has three categories with three sub categories in each in which teacher can get index bonuses. I support this approach because it changes the way the profession treats teaching, by saying it’s what you do not what you have done. that determines what kind of teacher you are. In most cases it puts the control in the teachers‘ hands. While I doubt that increased pay will make teaching much more attractive, I believe this approach to compensation raises the stature of the profession and hence may attract a larger crop of talented young people.

“Several (systems) have taken the radical step of scrapping all or part of their current pay plans to make way for performance-based pay. If such a shift caught on, it could mark the end of a teacher pay system that has been in effect for more than 50 years.”

“In Waseca, all the teachers got bonuses because student test scores went up. Some teachers got more than others. The bonuses ranged from $1,200 to $3,900, said Waseca TAP coordinator Mary Jenatscheck. At Minneapolis' Andersen Open School, another TAP participant, bonuses ranged from $1,000 to $2,000. Bonus day at Andersen was generally a quiet one.”