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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Virginia’s largest school district says no to performance pay By Valerie Strauss

It is seriously refreshing to hear that just as soon as Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell announced a new teacher performance pay pilot program that would tie their pay to student standardized test scores, the state’s largest school system said thanks but no thanks.

Jack Dale, superintendent of Fairfax County public schools, told my colleague Kevin Sieff that the district’s previous experiment with performance pay, in the early 1980s, was a failure and that he would pass on the program and any attached funding that comes with it — even in these financially troubled times.

McDonnell, jumping on a standardized test-based performance pay bandwagon spreading across the country with the backing of the Obama administration, announced a pilot program Tuesday that would distribute a total of $3 million to districts in the state that have one or more of the 169 schools that he said were difficult to staff. Forty are in Northern Virginia, nine of them in Fairfax. (The list is below.)

Assessment experts say it is a lousy idea — meaning the results are unreliable and invalid — to judge teachers on how well their students do on standardized tests, but that obviously isn’t stopping McDonnell, who is making use of the tests mandatory for program participants.

Yet two Virginia school districts questioned why some of their schools were even on the list, saying they weren’t hard to staff.

One of them is Loudoun County public schools, where spokesman Wayde Byard questioned the placement of five Loudoun schools.

Linda Erdos of Arlington County public schools, which had the most schools, 17, on the list, also said she was perplexed about how some of the schools got on the list and why others were not included. Arlington Traditional Elementary, for example, is on the list but has been high-achieving for years and hasn’t struggled to hire teachers.

Arlington has its own teacher pay schedule that rewards teacher based on a portfolio of actions — including becoming National Board Certified — that demonstrates professional standards without the use of test scores, Erdos said.

So let’s review:

• The Virginia governor issues a list of 169 schools that he says are hard to staff.

• At least two school systems say there are schools on the list that are not, in fact, hard to staff.

• The governor, at a time of great financial difficulty, finds $3 million for a pilot program that the largest school system says was tried and failed previously, and that people who really understand assessment says is bogus.