this is what education has become...

Give Top Teachers a Bonus
Little Rock rewards teachers; unions resist.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, January 19, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Is there a bigger scandal in America than the low state of inner-city schools? Oprah Winfrey, utterly frustrated with the problem, last month discussed the $40 million she has spent building the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls--in South Africa. Ms. Winfrey said South African students want to learn, but in U.S. schools, "the sense that you need to learn just isn't there." Where'd it go?

There are multiple-choice answers to that question, and most of them are right. Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York offered one answer in his State of the City speech Wednesday: The desire to learn disappeared down the bottomless well of centralized public-school bureaucracies. Mayor Bloomberg proposed greatly increased autonomy for school principals--one irrefutably proven answer to making a school better. He also wants teachers to prove they deserve tenure, an idea so obvious that it probably has no chance.

One measure of the tenure decision for New York City teachers would be their students' test scores. News accounts said the city teachers' union is "certain to fight" linking test scores to tenure. This, too, is among the multitude of correct answers for why students have no incentive to learn in big-city schools.

Mike Bloomberg, a name difficult to keep out of conversations about national politics, has been known to make visits elsewhere in the country on what we political gamesters would call "exploratory" trips. Let me suggest that the mayor explore a Southern strategy in Little Rock, Ark., where five grade schools are continuing an experiment in linking teacher merit pay to student test scores, first described in this space in October 2005.

That column, "How One School Found a Way to Spell Success," described how teachers at the Meadowcliff School, formerly full of student underachievers, were promised bonuses linked to improvements in the standardized test performance of each student. (The column is available on OpinionJournal here.) The size of the bonus increased relative to the student's year-over-year test gains. A 4% improvement earned a $100 bonus, rising to $400 if the student gained 15% (some did). Everyone in the school was in the bonus plan, including the cafeteria ladies, who started eating with the kids rather than in their own lounge. It worked. Scores improved. Twelve teachers got bonuses from $1,800 to $8,600. The checks were handed out in a public ceremony. Oprah would love Meadowcliff.

Last year, they added Wakefield School to the bonus program (after the school's unionized teachers voted overwhelmingly for it), and this year three more grade schools--Geyer Springs, Mabelvale and Romine. All are urban schools of the sort everyone in America professes to be concerned about, notwithstanding that public concern gets a D+ for achievement every year.

The first formal attempt to analyze the Little Rock merit-pay experiment was released earlier this week by the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The study, led by the university's Gary Ritter, focused on the results in a single school, Wakefield, which had consistent student test scores across three years.

The Ritter study also summarized the expansion and refinement of the incentive program since its inception. At Wakefield (and the three newest schools), the bonuses are awarded for the average growth in test scores of each teacher's class, rather than per-student achievement as at Meadowcliff. At the fall start of Wakefield's first year in the program, its students tested in the 16th percentile; at year's end they were in the 29th percentile. Its teachers got $228,300 in bonuses. Meadowcliff's second-year bonuses totaled $200,926.

For consistency, the study looked at results on a standardized math test given at Wakefield School the past three years to each student, ending in the fourth and fifth grades. The school's teachers were covered by the bonus program last year. The students' math grades improved by a standard measure (called NCE) of 3.5 points, while those in three Little Rock comparison schools declined. That 3.5 point gain equals about one-sixth of the normally cited national average gap in math scores between black students and white students. If compounded for six years, the gap would close.

Too hopeful?
It seems to be for the Little Rock teachers' union. A man versed in the downward slope of many such good intentions warned me last year to watch for the counteroffensive from either Little Rock's bureaucrats or its teachers' union. The union has made its move. In last fall's school-board election, the union ran a slate of candidates and gained control of four of the board's seven seats. It hopes to capture one more school-board seat this September. By June, however, Little Rock will have five grade schools inside the merit-bonus program. If standardized test scores rise in these three new schools as well, it would take a special brand of community self-destruction to throw out the bonus program at the union's behest.

There'd be one more bitter irony in that, too. Just a few days ago, the school board in Rogers, Ark., in the affluent northwest corner of the state, voted 6-1 to apply for federal funding of a merit-pay program under the U.S. Department of Education's Teacher Incentive Program. Where do you think at least some the highest performing, bonus-earning teachers in Little Rock's urban schools will migrate to if the union's school board flattens their merit-pay program? The University of Arkansas education researchers, incidentally, plan to work with Rogers from Day One to measure outcomes if the plan goes forward.

The original money for the bonus program at Meadowcliff school, and its design, came from the Hussman Foundation of Little Rock. Since then, Walter Hussman Jr. has been able to solicit support for the plan's expansion to the other grade schools from the Walton Family Foundation and the Brown Foundation of Houston. If the program isn't killed, he expects to find funding for more schools from other out-of-state foundations.

Building a school for girls in South Africa is fine by me. But imagine how electrifying it would be if a U.S. citizen could ever believe in the efficacy of starting a Leadership Academy for Girls in Arkansas. Who said something about having a dream?

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.