In recent weeks, Denver Public Schools’ pay-for-performance plan burst into the spotlight as a key bone of contention in the district’s first teacher strike in 25 years. The strike ended February 14 after three days. But the performance plan remains in effect, albeit in modified form. In a recent article in Chalkbeat Colorado, Melanie Asmar traces the long history of ProComp, which was one of the first performance pay programs to be adopted by a large U.S. school district...
Source: National Education Policy Center
The Center for Assessment, Design, Research and Evaluation (CADRE) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) has conducted multiple studies of ProComp. Contributors from CU include assistant professor Allison Atteberry, professor Derek Briggs (a
National Education Policy Center Fellow); CADRE associate director
Elena Diaz-Bilello; and doctoral students Charles Bibilos, Sarah LaCour
and Michael Turner. NEPC Fellow Andrew Maul,
an assistant professor at the University of California at Santa
Barbara, also assisted with the studies. Each study had different sets
of authors, different research questions, and different methods.
This report draws upon their work, as well as more recent work conducted by
Atteberry, to examine what their research can tell us about some of the
criticisms of ProComp that played a part in the recent strike.
Teachers’ Criticism:
ProComp causes salaries to vary a great deal from one year to the next,
making it difficult for teachers to predict how much they will earn in a
given year.
Research: A 2018 journal manuscript
by Atteberry and LaCour, currently under peer review, states, “the
median teacher experienced a standard deviation of approximately $2,300
in their ProComp payments across school years. This suggests a fair
degree of instability in payments from one year to the next. Some of
these fluctuations likely arise because this PFP system has so many
different incentives, some of which are linked to noisy measures...”
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