Denver teachers whose total pay is tied to their performance don’t completely understand the complex system of bonuses, incentives and salary raises, multiple reports have found.
Teacher turnover rates had decreased but now are almost as high as 2005 — before a teacher’s pay was tied to performance.
Both issues helped prompt officials from Denver Public Schools and the teacher’s union to start drafting a new version of ProComp — the district’s professional compensation system — before the current agreement expires at the end of the month.
But two weeks from the deadline, officials don’t have the changes ready.
Henry Roman, the union president, said Tuesday that he’s hopeful some small changes would be ready before the end of the year.
DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg suggested that an agreement between the district and the union could extend the current system while negotiations continue. The changes would not go into effect until the 2016-17 school year, he said.
Last summer, a team of teachers and administrators got together to create guidelines for the new performance pay system.
Their , included a need to simplify and better explain the system, continue incentives throughout a teacher’s career and set up tiers that narrow the definition of “hard-to-serve schools.”
Those currently enrolled in ProComp — 88.6 percent of the 5,615 teachers in DPS — can get automatic bonuses of $2,439 for working in “hard to staff” assignments or “high-needs schools.” Teachers working at high-performing schools or those identified as high-growth also can get an equal bonus.
Studies have found that teachers believe it’s easier to guarantee more bonuses at high-performing schools than at hard-to-serve schools, making the incentive at high-needs schools ineffective.
found that, as a result, the highest-needs students often are paired with first-year teachers, rather than more-effective veteran teachers.
in teacher retention and student outcomes, but Derek Briggs, professor and researcher at the School of Education at CU, said a lot of those findings.
In an ideal new version of the pay system, Boasberg said, the district would increase incentives for teachers to work and stay in high-poverty schools. But it also would allow effective teachers to increase their salaries and grant extra compensation for those who take on leadership roles — all while making the system more simple.
“If you have incentives that people don’t understand, they don’t work,” Boasberg said.
Briggs said that perception is not only financial.
“We see a lot of teachers that will swing from exceeding expectations to not. That’s almost $2,500 on top of salary. So next year, if you don’t earn that, teachers perceive that as it’s being taken away, but not necessarily because teachers are doing something considerably different,” Briggs said. “If they start to feel it’s outside their control, it’s going to have a negative impact. It’s not just the financial issue, it’s the psychology of how they perceive the system.”
Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372, yrobles@denverpost.com or twitter.com/yeseniarobles
