Washington Proposes Making Great Teachers Rich

By Jeffrey Puryear

PREAL Co-director

Washington DC’s new Impact Plus program

employs the value-added approach to teacher pay

by rewarding high-performing teachers – like Tiffany

Johnson, above – with large bonuses and raises.

Image from the New York Times article “In

Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay.”

“We want to make great teachers rich.” This quote, by the chief of the Office of Human Capital of Washington DC’s public school system, summarizes the district’s new value-added approach to teacher compensation. The Impact Plus program rewards teachers with bonuses of between $2,400 and $25,000 if their students learn more than would be expected based on previous test scores. Consistently high performance merits permanent raises, and annual remuneration can reach as high as $130,000. In a recent New York Times article, Sam Dillon provides several examples of how the program appears to be achieving its intended objective.

In order to receive the extra pay, teachers must waive the right to tenure, an action that 30 percent of those eligible for bonuses and 20 percent of those eligible for raises refused to take. As we noted in a previous post on the subject, the program also includes provisions to fire the lowest-performing teachers, and 400 have been dismissed in the last two years. While other districts, such as Houston and New York City, have implemented programs similar to Impact Plus, Washington’s is the most innovative, and leads the country in testing whether value-added pay will improve learning in America’s schools.

View the full text of Dillon’s article on the subject, “In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay" here.