This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Ogden • The third-graders sat quietly, hoping to be called to the front of the classroom to claim their rewards for improving academically — red, blue and brown Tootsie Pops.
Slowly, every child was called up to get a treat, proof that they had improved in reading or math during their time in summer school at Dee Elementary in Ogden. They were students who had struggled academically.
"They just jumped like anything in these seven weeks," said teacher Ursula Jones on Thursday, the last day of summer school.
Ogden schools made headlines recently because of dramatic events there: a take-it-or-leave-it contract for teachers and an announcement that the district would phase out raises based on experience, known as "steps," and replace them with raises based on performance.
Teachers and others have decried those decisions, saying the board isn't making an effort to work with them. Others, however, including board members, say that though teachers have been working for years to improve achievement, the changes are necessary to address the district's academic woes.
The Ogden district has the lowest high school graduation rate of all the state's 41 districts. Its percentages of students who score proficient in math and reading on state tests are often lower than across the state as a whole. Ogden also has a higher percentage of students from low-income homes than any other district in the state — nearly 73 percent, not to mention many students learning English and many who move in and out of schools during the year.
Ogden school board member Brad Smith said the district's lagging achievement was the sole motivation in his mind for asking teachers to sign individual contracts without further negotiations and deciding to implement merit pay. He said when the teachers' old contract expired without a new one because of stalled negotiations, it was a chance for the board to push through reforms that it felt would improve education but wouldn't likely make it into a negotiated contract.
"We have a district where we have serious challenges," Smith said. "We've done things a certain way in this district for a long, long time ... and it's got us to where we're at."
Others, however, say the district should be working with teachers to boost achievement, and there's no proof that any of the changes will lead to improvement. Doug Stephens, Ogden Education Association (OEA) president, said negotiations stalled over disagreements about steps, not measures to improve achievement. He said teachers already have been working on achievement.
"We've been trying desperately to face the challenges we have, and they haven't been easy challenges," Stephens said, "and to just say, 'We have a bunch of lousy teachers and if we could just get rid of the lousy teachers, the whole system would improve,' that's naive."
Changes under way • Smith said the district has also been working to improve achievement, partly through modernization of buildings and technology.
Smith said performance pay is a logical next step. And for many district teachers, performance pay won't be an entirely new experience.
Several Ogden schools are already offering teachers performance pay as part of federal School Improvement Grants, though that money is in addition to steps, not instead of them. To get the grants, schools had to be among the lowest-achieving in the state and had to promise to make a number of big changes. Ogden got $4.9 million in grant money for three of its elementary schools — Dee, Odyssey and James Madison — which started making changes last school year and will continue to spend the money over the next two years. The district also got about $2 million for Ogden and Washington high schools, to share over three years starting next school year, said Sandy Coroles, Ogden's executive director of curriculum and federal programs.
"With the grants come money, and with additional money you can purchase the extra support you need to turn these schools around," Coroles said.
Dee, for example, is using the money to pay for summer school to help lower-achieving students; to extend instructional time by eliminating one of two 15-minute daily recesses; to implement Singapore math; to pay for an audit to analyze instructional strengths and weaknesses; to give computer adaptive testing; and to hire an instructional coach who will focus on working with teachers whose students are learning English, said principal Sondra Jolovich-Motes.
Dee teachers can also earn up to $1,200 each for improving their students' performance in reading and math, as part of the grant.
Teachers like Jones said the bonuses at the end of the year were a nice perk, but that money is not their motivation. She said she feels the same way about the district's plan to eventually replace steps with merit pay.
"I'm going to teach to the best of my ability whether I'm getting $1 million or $100," said Jones, who has been teaching at Dee for 15 years. Jones said she signed her contract because she cares about her students. All but one of the district's 697 teachers ultimately signed their contracts, after local union leaders urged them to do so, saying there was little choice.
"In this school and this district we want to make a difference in [students'] lives," Jones said.
Smith said he feels badly that the situation over contracts in Ogden reached the point it did, but feels the board was also left with little choice after negotiations broke down. He also believes performance pay can improve education.
"I believe that empowering excellent teachers and providing a mechanism to publicly recognize them and also recognize them through payroll ... provides a direct way to model good behavior," Smith said. "I also think maybe more subtly than that, but perhaps more powerful than the direct incentive, is the fundamental shift in school culture we're trying to bring about. School culture has to start being focused on outcomes from students, not on inputs for teachers."
Will the experiment work? • The Ogden District is believed to be the first district in the state to both refuse to negotiate a contract with teachers and to plan to replace steps with performance pay.
Emily Cohen, district policy director for the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which advocates reforming a range of teacher policies, said it's not unusual for urban districts — which often struggle with low achievement and high poverty rates — to be the first to try major reforms.
"They're sort of on the forefront because they've just had to grapple with these issues for longer," Cohen said.
Cohen said merit pay is not the way to drive achievement but rather a way to reward teachers. She said other changes, such as improving evaluation systems — which Ogden plans to do — and giving principals more say over who teaches in their schools can have a bigger impact.
"It's a way to recognize excellence, but it's not going to suddenly inspire teachers to bring out their A game," Cohen said of merit pay.
Robert Stonehill, managing director at the American Institutes for Research, said four elements seem to contribute to the success of any performance pay plan: transparency in how it works, fairness, an amount large enough to matter and stakeholder buy-in.
Not all the evidence, however, supports performance pay. A 2010 study conducted by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University found that rewarding teachers with bonus pay does not, alone, raise student test scores. And a recent RAND Corporation study of a New York City performance pay program also showed that the extra pay did not improve achievement, though elements of both studies have drawn criticism.
Ogden teachers say they're not opposed to the idea of merit pay; they're just wary of agreeing to a system that has not yet been designed. And some are skeptical of board pledges to include teachers in the plans' development on the heels of refusing to negotiate further with them on contracts.
Teachers and district leaders, however, agree on at least one thing: Ogden has achievement issues that can, and should, be addressed.
"We have some unique situations in the Ogden City School District, and we need to have dialogue with lots of individuals from parents and citizens to faculty and staff," said Ogden board president Don Belnap. "We need to come together and find out how we can help some of our children who have some very tough challenges. We think it can be done, and we think one aspect for this will be performance pay."
The two sides, however, disagree on how to go about improving achievement.
"In my opinion, Ogden School Board and even our national leadership are just going about this absolutely all wrong," said Letitia Teneau-Sword, a kindergarten teacher at James Madison Elementary and a member of the OEA's executive board. "Thinking you can go from the top down and change law and change policy and that will by itself impact student performance, it's not going to. You can change those things, but the real issue is a social issue."
— Tribune reporter Rosemary Winters contributed to this report.