There but for the wisdom of 97% of Seminole County teachers go we.

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State's top teacher not among 'bonus' crowd

by Erika Hobbs

Sentinel Staff Writer

July 20, 2007

Richard Ellenburg was good enough to win teacher of the year, not only in Orange County but for all of Florida.

Ellenburg was named Florida's top teacher for 2008 just last week.

But the Camelot Elementary science teacher was passed over when Orange County Public Schools notified thousands of his colleagues last week that they would share $10.4 million in bonus money. ...

Ellenburg was rated on how well his students did on a reading test, not a science test, according to a school-district spokeswoman. It was not clear why the science teacher's performance was based on a reading test.

However, the bonus program's critics say that's the fatal flaw.

Because Orange's program is based on several factors -- annual evaluations, FCAT scores, standardized-test scores or STAR exams -- they say there is no true way to evaluate the district's best teachers.

Or award them bonuses.

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Surprise! Predictions become reality in Orange County.

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Errors riddle tests to rate top teachers

Merit-pay bonuses in Orange are at stake. Almost 2 in 3 exams had some problem.
Erika Hobbs

Sentinel Staff Writer

July 20, 2007

Nearly 4,000 Orange County teachers will split $10 million in bonuses next month based largely on tests students took this spring that were hastily written and filled with so many errors that hundreds of questions were thrown out.

The extensive problems call into question whether thousands of other teachers, including Florida's teacher of the year, were wrongly denied the $2,024 bonuses.

Some teachers have already begun appealing the decisions. Many more have flooded administrators with e-mail and phone calls expressing outrage about flaws in the tests, which were designed to evaluate their performance and determine who should receive merit pay. ...

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1 of 3 Lake teachers get merit pay
Others to appeal bonus process


TAVARES - About 36 percent of Lake County's teachers and guidance counselors will get $2,000 merit bonuses.

That's good news for them and bad news for the 64 percent who did not.

B Grassel, president of the Lake County Education Association, said Monday some teachers who did not get cash bonuses are appealing.

A panel of teachers, principals, district administrators and the LCEA will meet starting today to hear those appeals.

To be eligible for a bonus under the state's Merit Award Program, a teacher had to score 71 points, Grassel said. Whether instructional personnel received a bonus depends on their evaluation by their principal, their students' gains on the FCAT and scores by teams of students on the FCAT. Those teams could be by grade level, subject area or any other group a school selected.

If teachers received at least 71 points, they get 5 percent of the average teacher pay in Lake County - just over $40,000 annually. The bonus comes out to $2,003 annually.

By Sept. 1, the district will distribute all teacher bonuses, Grassel said.

Some teachers are grumbling because not everyone teaches an FCAT subject. Many teach art, music, physical education and other electives. Those teachers received bonuses using scores on tests written by the school district and based on teacher-submitted questions. ...

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Merit-pay plan riles some teachers

Educators who do not meet the qualifications for a $2,000 bonus say the program is flawed.

Tanya Caldwell

Sentinel Staff Writer

July 15, 2007

Some of Lake County's most talented teachers may not receive bonuses under the district's new merit-pay program.

About 38 percent of Lake's eligible teachers recently received notices of their $2,000 bonuses. But some of those who aren't getting the money have called their union reps, saying the bonuses were distributed unfairly.

The new Merit Award Program is supposed to be an improved version of Special Teachers Are Rewarded, a program that Lake teachers had opposed because they said it was unfair to link their talents to test scores. Lawmakers revoked STAR this past spring, before it took effect.

But MAP doesn't seem to be going over very well, either. The union has gotten "quite a few phone calls" about it, mostly from teachers who just found out that they're not getting bonuses, said Jim Polk, the Lake County Education Association's new executive director. ...

Complaints of unfairness

So while some teachers were stressing over a state exam in which they had no say, others were preparing their students for district tests they helped draft.

"I could see where they might say that [it was unfair] because teachers might have had some input," Thomas said. But classroom teachers didn't write the tests; they just submitted questions for it, she said.

Those submissions helped the district, under pressure to put together its MAP plan, more quickly draft the tests, Thomas said. "Honestly, we didn't have a lot of options," she said. "We had no additional staff to make this happen." ...

Criteria for MAP

Under MAP, teachers are rewarded based on strong evaluations, individual success with students and success with students on their "teams," which schools could group by subject areas, grades or otherwise.

To measure student success, officials compare old test scores -- usually FCATs -- to new test scores.

But the comparison isn't always FCAT to FCAT.

Teachers who teach 12th-grade science, for example, use the students' most recent FCAT scores as a pre-test and a district exit exam for seniors as a post-test.

Their bonuses are based 100 percent on the exit exam.

The FCAT is administered to third- through 11th-graders.

Most core-subject teachers -- reading, writing, math, language arts, science and social studies -- are judged solely on FCAT scores.

Even nonteachers, such as guidance counselors and administrators, can get bonuses if their schools' FCAT scores improve.

But teachers who teach nonvocational and noncore electives, as well as physical-education teachers and the like, are judged 50 percent based on a school's overall FCAT score and 50 percent on the district exams for their subjects.

Some plan to appeal

Thomas said the district doesn't have a breakdown of which types of teachers got bonuses and which didn't. ...

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Merit bonuses elude top teachers
By RACHEL SIMMONSEN

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Friday, November 02, 2007

Of about 400 Martin County teachers and administrators awarded bonuses recently, one name was conspicuously absent: Carol Matthews O'Connor, the district's teacher of the year.

Fewer than half of the teachers of the year at the district's 22 schools earned a bonus under STAR (Special Teachers Are Rewarded), a controversial merit pay plan that was approved reluctantly last school year by the school board and teachers union.

"I'm just as disappointed as those who didn't get the money," school board member David Anderson said.

"I don't even know where to begin," teachers union chief Jeanette Phillips said of the program's faults.

School board members have said they had little choice but to adopt the plan: Florida school districts were required to come up with their own versions of STAR or lose their share of the $147.5 million allotted to the program. If Martin had opted out, it still would have had to come up with a performance-pay plan - and $1 million to pay for it.

Gov. Charlie Crist later repealed the STAR plan, which was adopted under his predecessor, Jeb Bush, but districts had the option of keeping the bonus programs they had approved already.

In August, the Martin school district handed out about $1 million in bonus money to 408 teachers and administrators, or about 28.4 percent of the instructional staff. The bonuses, equal to about 5 percent of an employee's salary, ranged from about $990 to about $3,580.

Many teachers complained that the criteria to qualify were unfair. They were evaluated largely on students' performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and personnel evaluations.

Teachers of subjects not covered by the FCAT were evaluated by their students' performance on other exams, including those created by the district.

To come up with the districtwide tests, teachers were asked to submit 25 questions they thought would be appropriate for an end-of-year exam. District administrators decided which questions would be used for the test, and that choice might have benefited the students at one school more than another, said Phillips, the teachers union chief.

Another problem was that students weren't graded for those district-designed tests, and they knew it. Many didn't take them seriously and performed poorly as a result, Phillips said. Their teachers' chances at bonus money disappeared.

Debra Alessandra, teacher of the year at Spectrum Junior/Senior High School, said there simply wasn't enough time to create good districtwide tests. The exams that were created "may not have accurately measured student growth."

Alessandra didn't receive a bonus. She said she wasn't sure why she fell short, but she doesn't like the idea of teacher bonuses anyway.

"Personally, I just feel like, for students to succeed, teachers need to work together, not feel like they're in competition," she said.

At a recent Warfield Elementary school advisory council meeting, O'Connor, the district's teacher of the year, talked about her own dismay at failing to qualify for a STAR bonus, even when "my evaluation was about as perfect as you can get."

Some teachers might have had the opposite problem, Phillips said. Even if a teacher had the district's highest student scores on standardized tests, he could miss out on a bonus if the evaluation was just satisfactory, not outstanding. The way the STAR grading system was designed, teachers had to meet a minimum standard on their evaluation; if they failed that, it didn't matter how wonderful their student scores were, Phillips said.

She doesn't feel much better about the district's latest bonus plan, the Merit Award Program, which still must be ratified by the teachers union. The school board approved the plan in September.

Under the proposal, each employee would be given an "effectiveness score," 21 percent of which would come from personnel evaluations. The remaining 79 percent of would be determined by student learning gains or proficiency on standardized tests such as the FCAT and district-designed exams, which now will count toward student grades.

Still, Phillips doesn't like the idea of teachers being judged on students' test performance, which falls largely outside teachers' control. She said she has heard too many stories of students performing poorly on tests because they learned the day before that their parents were divorcing or that a grandparent was hospitalized.

Besides, Phillips said, "All of our schools are A schools, so that tells you all of our teachers are working hard."

Many teachers who earned the STAR bonuses have said they don't want to discuss it or share the news with colleagues.

"It created a lot of animosity," said Maureen Basilico, teacher of the year at Challenger School, who earned a bonus. "I felt really bad for those who didn't."

Even so, Basilico said it's not necessarily a bad thing to give teachers an "extra incentive" to work hard. "I don't personally have a problem with that."
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Teachers reject test-based bonus
November 15, 2007

LAKE COUNTY - Lake County teachers have decided by a two-to-one margin to ditch the controversial merit-pay plan where bonuses were largely based on FCAT and other test scores.

Teachers voted down the Merit Award Program on Wednesday in a 1,198-569 vote, said teachers union officials. Their decision means the school district will not participate in the state bonuses for the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years.

"The teachers of Lake County have spoken," teachers union president B. Grassel said in a statement, "and they have spoken against MAP."

The Lake County School Board submitted a merit-pay plan to the state for both years in September, under the condition that teachers ratify the bonuses. Lake was one of 26 school districts in Florida's 67 counties to submit plans to continue the performance-pay program, according to the Florida Department of Education.

Under the revised merit-pay plan, bonuses would have been rewarded based largely on performance evaluations and student performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and district exams in other subject areas.

About 38 percent of Lake's eligible teachers qualified for bonuses last year that were worth about $2,000 each, school officials said. But many teachers -- including some who got the money -- didn't think the merit-pay plan was fair, teachers union officials said.
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