Houston Board OKs Revamped Performance-Pay Plan

The Houston school board last night unanimously approved an overhaul of the nation’s largest performance-pay plan for teachers.

The revision of the controversial performance-bonus system comes at a time of heightened interest— and pushback—about such programs nationwide. This week, both national teachers’ unions objected to proposed provisions in the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act that would create pay-for-performance plans based, at least in part, on student test-score gains.

The 200,000-student Houston district will continue to reward schools and teachers whose success in raising student test scores exceeds that of their peers. But the newly named ASPIRE Award program, which stands for Accelerating Student Progress Increasing Results & Expectations, is intended to address many of the shortcomings that dogged the program’s first year. The retooled program, for example, seeks to improve communications with teachers, strengthen the data analysis on which the awards are based, and make a much larger number of educators...