School Turnover Highlights Performance-Pay Complexity

A recent newspaper story reporting that more than half the schools earning rewards in the first year of the Texas pay-for-performance program will not be eligible to receive bonuses this year had the Texas Education Agency scrambling last week to provide more detail about the decisionmaking process behind the complex program.

The Dallas Morning News said last week that only 501 of the approximately 1,150 campuses that participated in the Texas Educator Excellence Grants program last school year also are eligible for the bonuses in the 2007-08 school year. That would mean that more than 600 schools would have to terminate bonus payments ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 per teacher.

After the story appeared last week, officials at the agency said a large number of those schools lost out this year because competition from other schools was far stiffer than it had...