More teachers to receive exam-based bonuses

7,200 Florida teachers will get bonuses this year under a hotly debated program that ties the extra pay to scores on college admissions exams.

These teachers are eligible for the state’s Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarship Program and will earn bonuses of about $6,800 each, according to the

Florida Department of Education. They are to be paid by April 1.

The program, fiercely controversial since its inception, is likely to get renewed scrutiny from state lawmakers this year.

The number of bonus-eligible teachers this year is about 1,800 more than last year and represents about 4 percent of Florida’s public school teachers.

The Legislature, which cre- ated the program in 2015, touted $10,000 bonuses but earmarked a fixed amount of money, so the value of the bonuses shrinks if more teachers qualify. The 2016 winners received about $8,200 each.

The 2-year-old program rewards teachers based partly on if they had SAT or ACT exam scores in the top 20 percent the year they took them, even if that was decades ago. Experienced teachers also need a “highly effective” evaluation to earn the money, though first-year instructors can receive it solely based on test scores.

David Cooper, a math teacher at Olympia High School in Orange County, will get a bonus this year after missing out last year because he could not get an official copy of his 1986 SAT

scores sent in by the program’s deadline.

He understands the arguments against “best and brightest,” particularly that old college admission scores may be a poor barometer of current skills in the classroom.

“The test I took as a junior in high school?” he said. “How does this test determine whether you’re a good teacher or not?”

Cooper, a teacher since 2001, said he’d prefer the state devise other measures to reward top instructors but still appreciates the program means extra money for at least some classroom teachers.

Lawmakers have not made the program a permanent state law but instead have authorized it one year at a time, so its continuation will be debated again this spring.

“Strap on your seat belt for that, because it will be an interesting journey,” said Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, chairman of the Senate’s education budget committee, at a meeting last month.

He said he wants to find ways to boost teacher pay but would like to see changes to the bonus program, perhaps ones that lead to rewards for more teachers. Those must be negotiated with the House, however, where the program got its start, so changes are “going to be an issue,” he said.

In the fall, the education department and the State Board of Education recommended the state scrap best and brightest and replace it with a bonus plan that would reward teachers who’d helped their students make the biggest academic gains and that would help recruit teachers to struggling schools and to hardto-fill classes.

Gov. Rick Scott has signaled that he liked the department’s idea, while leaders in the House have suggested some willingness to alter the program, perhaps by lowering the needed test scores, so more teachers would be eligible, the News Service of Florida reported.

The current requirement demands ACT or SAT scores in the 80th percentile or above. Those who took the tests in 1992, for example, need an ACT composite score of 24 or better or SAT scores of at least 520 verbal and 590 math to qualify.

Backers argue it provides needed financial rewards to Florida’s top teachers and helps keep them in the state’s public schools. They said it will also help recruit strong college students into the teaching profession.

But critics, including many teachers, call it absurd to pay bonuses based on college exam scores and say such a system unfairly eliminates some excellent instructors. They also say it makes no sense to reward first-year teachers who’ve yet to prove themselves in the classroom.

Many also note that who is evaluated as “highly effective” varies widely by school district and by school year, so teachers in some districts are more likely to be “highly effective” than those working in others.

The percentage of “highly effective” teachers in Orange was about 78 percent for the 2015-16 school year, which likely helped more teachers win the bonuses this year.

Teachers who qualified for the award last year were eligible again this year as long as they maintained their “highly effective” rating. Officials said some teachers who could not access official test-score reports by last year’s deadline likely did this year while others retook the tests to qualify. That likely helped boost the number of winners this year.

The Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers union, says the program discriminates against minorities, who historically haven’t done as well as whites on the exams, and against those who never took the exams or took them too long ago to access official score reports. It filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is pending.