Performance Anxiety

Denver teachers made history by agreeing to link pay to achievement. But will voters (and students) go along?

By Kerby Meyers

It’s a few weeks into the fall session, and in a gritty central Denver neighborhood, math teacher Taylor Betz is trying to steer her class of 28 8th graders toward line equations. Trying and trying—many students have come to class without their homework and take turns wandering around the room, talking and poking each other with rulers. Betz repeatedly has to raise her voice above the clamor, and more than once she escorts a flagrantly misbehaving teen out to the hall for a good talking-to. “That’s bullshit,” a student tells her after she informs him he’ll have to stay after school.

About 25 miles away, in a crisp, new, climate-controlled middle school in suburban Highlands Ranch, Colorado, science teacher John McKinney is explaining evolution to a class of 27 8th graders. Gesturing toward the full-color photo enlargements and maps that fill the two walls not dominated by large whiteboards, McKinney dives into an excursus on the difference between quantitative and qualitative analysis. Aside from a few murmurs between students about the subject at hand, the class is church-mouse quiet. The only discipline problem McKinney encounters all afternoon is a kid leaning back in his chair.

Geographic proximity aside, the two classrooms—and what it takes to teach in each one—couldn’t be further apart. And yet, despite the night-and-day contrast in the preparedness of Betz’s and McKinney’s students, if Denver voters give the nod next year, both teachers will be working under contracts that tie part of their pay to their students’...