State adds bonus to lure top teachers

Florida to offer $15K incentives to work in D and F schools

Florida teachers with “proven records of success” will be eligible for new bonuses of up to $15,000 if they work in the state’s neediest schools with D and F grades, the Florida Department of Education announced.

The bonuses would be paid for out of a nearly $16 million federal grant the department said it receives annually to help boost achievement in Florida’s lowest-performing schools.

Teachers could receive the new bonuses if they have high evaluation scores as calculated under the state’s value-added model, or VAM, and work at D and F rated schools that receive federal Title 1 funds, which are earmarked for students living in poverty.

“High-quality teachers are the most important contributing factor to student success,” said Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, in a statement on Tuesday night. “This is another way we are leveling the playing field for all Floridians, and we are thrilled for the opportunity to reward our state’s hard-working teachers in the process.”

Teachers would need to be rated “highly effective” or “effective” based on three years of VAM scores in order to be eligible for the bonuses of $15,000 or $7,500, respectively, the department said.

VAM scores were authorized by the state’s 2011 teacher merit-pay law. They are calculated by crunching student test score data and then working to tease out an individual teacher’s impact on student performance while also taking into account factors outside the instructor’s control, such as a student’s absentee rate.

The VAM scores play into overall teacher evaluations, but the new bonuses would be based only the those ratings, not overall ratings, which include other factors such as classroom observations.

Eighteen percent of Florida teachers evaluated under the VAM system at the end of the 2017-18 school year — the most recent year for which data is available — were deemed “highly effective” and 54 percent were classified as “effective,” according to the department. The remaining 28 percent were rated either as “needs improvement” or “unsatisfactory.”

The 2019 school grades, released last week, showed 172 schools out of 3,300 earned Ds or Fs.

There was one F in Central Florida — Beverly Shores Elementary School in Leesburg. Lake County had one D-rated school, Orange County had 11 and Osceola County had three. Seminole County had no D or F schools this year.