School board member Tom Farrell says Nebraska City’s response to federal education reform should reward good teachers by making a stand when teaching is not acceptable.
New federal guidelines require school districts to include student achievement as part of teacher evaluations, which influence salaries, promotions and retention.
Rather than increasing pay when students meet federal objectives, Farrell suggested reviews of annual pay raises when students fall short.
Right now, he said, the teacher evaluation system results in a determination of either satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
If the job is unsatisfactory and the teacher has less than three years experience, the teacher can be dismissed. However, a teacher with more than three years is considered tenured, and can be fired only with documentation of a deficiency.
Last year, the school negotiated a base salary of $30,825 with an automatic pay increase of 4.5 percent each year. New teachers may be considered to start with 10 years of experience.
A tenured teacher with a master degree and 36 hours of additional coursework can earn up to $60,417 a year.
Rather than increasing pay for the highest earners, Farrell said, the 4.5 percent automatic pay raise should be scrutinized when school district goals are not met.
“I’m interested in making sure our kids are learning what we say we’re teaching them,” Farrell said.
He said studies by Dr. Bernard Irlenbusch of the London School of Economics and Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind,” have influenced him.
He said the studies show that pay linked to established goals is highly effective for mechanical jobs and laborious tasks. For cognitive processes, however, the pay did not result in better job performance.
“If teachers love what they’re doing and we step in an offer pay, we’ve muddled what was an emotional drive for excellence for an economic drive. It seems to me that must’ve been what took place (in the London study),” he said.
“If you think about it, won’t the best teachers stay the best teachers whether you pay them more or not,” he said.
Farrell said he believes in merit pay and has proposed teacher bonuses in past negotiations with teachers, but said the Nebraska Education Association has firmly opposed it.
Farrell said he has sought bonus pay for leaders of school activities. The extra pay would reward teachers when goals are met, such as the one-act play making it to state competition or athletic teams bringing home trophies.
He said the teachers union mounted “significant resistance” to the ideas and have even brought lawsuits against Nebraska schools that attempted to increase pay for meeting goals.
