St. Cloud's plan was paying for performance, but not to the standands set by MDE; it was paying for student achievement, teachers learning and teacher evaluation. MDE expects a greater percentage tied to student achievement.
The editorial board for the St. Cloud Times wrote about Senator Tarryl Clark's proposal regarding Q-Comp. What she is attempting to do is help all schools that are now in Q-Comp and those that may be engaged in the process in the future. The view that District 742 was not using Q-Comp to pay for performance needs to be addressed. The Q-Comp dollars in this district were being used to pay for teacher professional development to help teachers utilize the best practices of teaching. Pay-for-performance was targeted toward teaching performance (teacher evaluation and professional development) and student achievement (test scores). MDE was satisfied that we were moving into a reformed salary schedule (with teacher approval), but they wanted a greater percentage linked to student achievement. The problem is that there's no guarantee that Q-Comp is going to increase student achievement; there is research that says that better prepared teachers coupled with better teaching practices will increase student achievement.
I have been in contact with the Senator about her proposal. It is my hope that no other district will ever have to spend countless hours of staff time engaged in a "fix-it" plan during the school year. By all practical purposes, and in all fairness, we should have been notified of being a non-compliant district previous to the summer of 2008. We had planned on using Q Comp and the budget for Q-Comp in the 2008-09 school year. Finding out about this in July after the budget is established was too late; this has put a burden on our district financially.
