After the United Kingdom passed legislature that, starting September 2014, would combine teacher salary increases with performance criteria, some U.S. regions are finally following suit. The idea has been tossed around America’s hallways for years, but only after the U.K. decided to pilot the effort did teachers at home begin to see the potential benefits.
Merit pay, or the concept of tying together salaries based on performance measures, is an increasingly popular use of incentive compensation management (ICM) that can be worked into intermit evaluations. ICM plans, like merit increases, can be tracked through ICM software to increase transparency between managing entities and public school teachers. This feature allows educators to be able to financially plan and are aware of what milestones and benchmark numbers they must accomplish before receiving a boost in salary.
ICM for educators catching on
In South Carolina, state Rep. Andy Patrick (R-Hilton Head Island) proposed a bill to the South Carolina House that would seek merit pay for teachers based on student outcomes, according to The Associated Press.
“The intent is to identify weaknesses that individual teachers have to provide them with the targeted professional development that they deserve as professionals,” the lawmaker said.
Similarly in Chippewa Falls, Wis., school districts have began mulling over options that would allow for teachers to be eligible for higher pay based on performance initiatives, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. For example, one teacher taught herself how to track GPS coordinates then taught her students and developed software that allowed her to measure how well her students were learning. Now, she hopes to use that software as a bargaining point to leverage a higher salary.
This type of innovation is a common byproduct of ICM structures that allow for more personal autonomy to be creative in ways that help students while also earning a comparable salary. When teachers feel they have more freedom to develop lessons and initiatives that speak to their strengths and skill sets, they are more likely to use those skills to guide their students to achieving new heights.
Using ICM, educators can know what they need to accomplish in the classroom in order to earn higher pay according to what their performance-based evaluations state. In the cases above, student outcomes like grades and standardized test scores quantified how well the teacher utilized her skills in order for her students to succeed and compensation to be increased.
Going forward, school districts should consider the benefits of empowering educators to exercise more control over the content of their classroom in order to work toward higher pay.
