October 23, 2015

INTRODUCTION

The critical importance and impact of great teachers is undebatable. “The national research is clear: good teachers dramatically increase student’s achievement”¹ while ineffective teachers stunt student growth.

In fact, Douglas County School Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen says “two poor teachers in a row and a student doesn’t recover.”² That frightening statement is backed up by Kati Haycock, the CEO of The Education Trust and co-author of “Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality”³ who says “The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover.”⁴

Academic studies clearly show the transformative impact a great teacher can have on students in the classroom and even outside the classroom. “Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings”⁵ according to a new study⁶ that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years. “Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000,”⁷ the authors of the study estimate. “Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms. ‘If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income,’ said Professor Friedman, one of the coauthors.”⁸ The study, The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood, was released in 2011. Over time, it becomes more evident that the teacher makes a difference in a student’s life outcomes. Once a student crosses the threshold to enter the classroom, the teacher begins to pave the way for the student’s future. The difference between a student with a well-constructed path and one with a non-existent or poorly constructed one will be distinguishable later in a student’s life.

Despite this research-based knowledge, very few major school districts in America differentiate teacher pay based upon performance or pay new hires based on the supply of teachers for a certain discipline against the demand in the sector for those teachers. However, three years ago the Douglas County School District (DCSD) broke the mold when it implemented both a pay for performance system and a market based pay guide for hiring its teachers. Both programs reflect the understanding DCSD has about the rapid transition education is undergoing across America.