Policy Breakfast on Differentiated Pay for Teachers

For the past three years, the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy have held a series of meetings for policy makers, opinion leaders, researchers, business people, and educators that has been devoted to thorough, thoughtful consideration and constructive dialogue on critical education policy and improvement issues. We hope that you will join us for our next invitation-only policy breakfast forum where we will discuss the issue of performance-based teacher pay and the potential impact of creating a system that rewards teachers based on their students’ achievement.

We will convene on Tuesday, December 13, from 8:30 -10:00 a.m. at the Omni Parker House located at 60 School Street in downtown Boston. Our room location will be clearly posted in the hotel lobby. We will serve a buffet breakfast beginning at 8:00 a.m., prior to the 90-minute discussion.

The idea of paying teachers according to what their students learn is gaining support nationally and here in Massachusetts with Governor Romney’s recent merit pay proposal which seeks to reward good teachers for a job well done and provides math and science teachers with higher salaries. The challenges that threaten this and other merit-based pay plans include addressing the issues of accurately linking teacher bonuses to student performance, finding effective and comprehensive methods for evaluating teacher performance, and avoiding the potential divisiveness of paying some teachers more than others based on the subjects they teach. During our upcoming forum, we hope to explore both opportunities and impediments to performance-based pay for teachers, as well as policy implications within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Researcher Donald Gratz, who studied and provided technical assistance for the Pay for Performance Pilot in the Denver Public Schools, will discuss potential lessons to be learned from ProComp, the pay plan approved by Denver voters. Next, Massachusetts Chief Economist Robert Costrell will speak about Governor Romney’s plan to base teacher pay on their students’ test scores along with peer and principal evaluations. Finally, Harvard Graduate School of Education Lecturer Katherine Boles, who has researched and written about the teaching profession, will comment on various proposed merit-based pay plans and their impact on the profession.