NYC Rewards Teachers for Student Academic Progress

By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 10/22/2007 6:00:00 AM

Bonuses for teachers who raise student achievement? That’s a plan New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and the city’s United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently finalized a cash incentive program that would help kids in poorer areas.

The schoolwide bonus program will be implemented in about 200 of the city’s highest-need schools during the current school year and expand to another 200 schools in the 2008-09 academic year.

Participating schools whose students achieve “significant measurable academic progress” will receive monetary bonuses, which will be directly distributed to teachers. Each participating school will have a four member “compensation committee,” which will decide how to distribute the funds, and each school will receive enough money to give each fulltime teacher $3,000. In its first year, participating teachers will be eligible to receive about $20 million in bonuses, which comes from private donations. .

The program is the largest initiative in the nation to reward educators who teach in high-need schools based on whether students perform well academically.

“We should offer our educators incentives not just to take on the toughest assignments, but also to get the best possible outcomes from their students,” Klein said.

This is the latest move by the Bloomberg administration to provide cash incentives to help New Yorkers break the “cycle of poverty” Last July, the mayor’s offer announced a pilot program to compensate fourth-and seventh-graders for doing well on standardized tests. And in September, the city started offering families with kids in elementary, middle, or high school $50 for signing up for a library card.