A good friend of mine, let’s call her Anne, left my old district school the same time as me. Anne was a fantastic teacher, one who helped our school dramatically raise its test scores. She was beloved by the students she taught and genuinely cared about their futures and well-being. She seemed to love the kids and the school, and for this reason, I was honestly surprised when she decided to leave.

When I asked her why she was leaving, she said how hard it was, but gave me a very insightful answer that I think is relevant to the current merit pay discussion going on in SCS. If everything was going to be based on teacher evaluations, she said, she couldn’t afford to be at a school where she wouldn’t be able make a high evaluation score simply by virtue of the fact that the school was a priority school.

This was two years ago, before the district was even considering merit pay. I think that Anne’s rationale for leaving a priority school is more true today than ever before given the district’s new proposed merit pay system. My fear is that should this merit pay scheme go into effect as written, with no other changes to accompany it, the policy will lead to a mass exodus of quality teachers from the places where they are needed most, our lowest performing schools.

Level 5 Is Possible

Before continuing, let’s make sure we’re clear on something – it is possible to be a level 5 teacher in a priority school. EdWeek reported in a study they did last year in Tennessee that of the 83 priority schools across the state in 2013, there were about 375 level 5 teachers. That’s about 4.5 per school, suggesting that while not easy, high evaluation scores are possible in high need schools.

However, unless the merit pay system offers some type of compensation like a bonus to teach in these schools, I’d wager that many teachers won’t want to go work in these places if it threatens their salary. I’ll go so far as to predict that if this policy is enacted without any other supports, the district will see a mass exodus of high performing teachers from priority schools.

Why This Will Happen

There are three reasons I think this is a very likely outcome. First, test scores can and do fluctuate from year to year within priority schools for a number of reasons, and with these fluctuations come fluctuations in evaluation scores that many teachers don’t feel are their fault. I’ve known teachers who teach tested subjects in high need schools go from 1’s to 5’s in one year, and it goes the opposite way as well.

Much of this variation is subject to circumstances beyond a teacher’s control, such as attendance within the school and quality of administration. For example, my second year teaching, attendance in our building was atrociously low, which I believe played a role a collective drop in overall scores building wide. That wasn’t something that teachers could control, but had I personally been paid based on my performance, my raise would have dropped, resulting in thousands of dollars lost over my career because of something that was beyond my control.

Second, evaluation scores are often perceived to be subjective to the thoughts and desires of administrators. The belief among many of my district level colleagues is that, rightly or wrongly, evaluation scores are loaded. Many feel that teachers who are liked and valued will get the higher scores. One SCS teacher recently shared to me that they felt the best way to obtain a good evaluation score was to become a coach or be a disciplinarian, as it would make the principal more likely to give you good scores. If teachers don’t have trust in the system, they won’t stick it out in difficult environments.

Third, many high performing teachers do not have their own data and have to take that of their school. If the school’s data is a 1 or a 2, there’s almost no way that these teachers can achieve a rating of a 5, no matter how good their evaluation score may be. When push comes to shove then, its just another reason why high performing educators won’t stay in priority schools.

These self-reported teacher findings are backed up by additional research. A study in Texas by Kirby, Naftel and Berends (1999) found that teachers are especially sensitive to pay and working conditions, especially those who worked in districts with high levels of economically disadvantaged students (60 percent or higher).  Another researcher, Podursky (2001) found that “if all teachers are compensated equally, and without reflecting the difficulty of the task at hand, then they will naturally move to jobs with less stress, fewer demands, and easier students to teach.”  A final study by Hanushek et. al. (2001) concluded that teachers need to be paid at least 50% more to teach in hard-to-staff schools. This would not happen under the current SCS policy as written.

In summary, if teachers feel that their salary will go down in a challenging situation, they’re likely to leave for greener pastures. It doesn’t really matter if this is actually the reality – it’s the perception grounded in a pre-existing belief about priority schools and the existing evaluation system. Unless this changes, I fear we’ll see more teachers like Anne driven away from priority schools under this new merit pay system.

Possible Solutions

There are ways for the district to overcome these problems when it comes to salaries. One proven way is to offer signing bonuses or salary bumps for teachers to work in hard to staff schools. Experiments in Mississippi and California in which signing bonuses are given out at intervals during a multi-year period found that this increased teacher recruitment and retention to high need schools. However, to date the only schools in SCS that do anything like this is the iZone, which offers a $1,000 signing bonus and a $1,000 bonus for staying with the district each year after. Unless this changes, I fear that more teachers like Anne will make the same tough decision and leave our priority schools for greener pastures.

Follow Bluff City Education on Twitter @bluffcityed and look for the hashtag #iteachiam and #TNedu to find more of our stories.  Please also like our page on facebook.