ProComp bonus system at heart of Denver teachers, district discord
At the core of the compensation battle between Denver Public Schools district officials and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association is a pay system once heralded by both sides as a way to get more money to teachers and draw the best educators into difficult schools and subjects.
Professional Compensation System for Teachers, or ProComp as it’s widely known, burst onto the national education scene as a Denver pilot program beginning in 1999. The program stood out in the education world for its unique mission to pay teachers based on their performance rather than just the typical seniority and educational level system.
“The beauty of ProComp seemed to be that everybody bought in — the union, the district and taxpayers,” said Paul Teske, dean and distinguished professor of the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs who co- authored the 2007 book “Pay for Performance Teacher Compensation: An Inside Story of Denver’s ProComp Plan.” Twenty years later, educators in the state’s largest district say the bonus system actually eroded their ability to earn a fair, predictable salary and are on the verge of striking for the first time since 1994. District officials have agreed that teachers need to make more money and that the bonus system is confusing, but say it has been effective at drawing qualified teachers to struggling schools and keeping them there.
Innovative, complex
“ProComp was very innovative in its concept and design, and it’s also very complicated,” said DPS Superintendent Susana Cordova, who was a DPS elementary school principal at the time ProComp was piloted. “It needs to be a simpler system.”
The ProComp contract that expired Jan. 18 offered 14 incentives so that teachers and specialized service professionals like school nurses and psychologists could earn money on top of their base pay. The incentives, which varied from less than $500 to $5,000, are based on categories like:
• Student growth: working at a top-performing, high-growth school
• Market incentives: teaching at high-poverty schools and in hard-to-staff positions
• Knowledge and skills: earning new advanced degrees and approved professional development
• Professional evaluation: receiving a satisfactory professional evaluation
• Teacher leadership: serving in a formal teacher leadership role
The teachers union and the district each have proposals meant to simplify the pay-for-performance system. But the DCTA is also pushing for a reduced reliance on bonuses, noting they leave educators with unpredictable pay that can be based off circumstances out of their control, like their school’s collective student test scores.
Starting salary
A starting teacher salary in DPS for the 2019-20 school year comes in at $43,255, according to an analysis from the Colorado Office of State Planning and Budgeting. Boulder Valley educators earn a $47,726 starting salary, assuming a 3 percent inflation increase for the upcoming school year. Adams 12 educators start at $40,783, the state analysis found.
So what was the union’s attraction to the plan back in the day? Rob Gould, a DPS educator and DCTA lead negotiator, said the selling point for Denver teachers was the promise of more money toward their salaries.
“I think a lot of us were open-minded because of that promise that ProComp would provide us with the professional pay we deserved,” Gould said.
Grant money from Rose Community Foundation helped fund a four-year ProComp pilot program that tested out merit pay at 16 schools. To move beyond the pilot, ProComp had to win the hearts of the community in the form of a $25 million tax increase.
Phil Gonring, a former Denver teacher who managed education grantmaking at Rose Community Foundation from 1996 to 2011, said around the time of ProComp’s origin, educators across the country were fixated on a 1996 report that influenced the complex pay structure at the center of Denver school district’s strike today. The report, called “What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future” stressed the importance of quality teachers and linked attracting and retaining those teachers through compensation systems based on merit pay.
“It’s criminal what we pay teachers in this country,” Gonring said. “I was a teacher in DPS a long time ago … and I’ve gone on to make a ton of money through my career now in comparison, but I never worked so hard in my life than when I was a teacher, and I will never have the impact on the world more than I did when I was a high school teacher. We need to pay these folks more, but on the other hand … we can’t pay everybody the same amount of money just because they’re a year older or get a degree. There has to be something in there that is about meeting organizational objectives. That’s what ProComp was about.”
In 2004, DCTA and the Board of Education voted to approve the new compensation system.
District and union leaders flocked to bars, parties, community meetings and churches to explain the new pay system to voters, and the joint campaign paid off. In 2005, Denver voters approved the tax increase, which is adjusted for inflation annually. This year, the ProComp tax money is expected to kick in $33 million toward teacher compensation.
Neither the union or the district wants to risk scrapping ProComp altogether and losing out on the $33 million, so both are trying to revamp it in their respective images.
Cordova and Gould admit that changes to ProComp have led to teacher dissatisfaction with the program.
Gould points to 2008 when the district steered the ProComp contract further toward bonuses that chipped away at teacher’s base pay.
“Because we were paying out these high one-time bonuses, that’s what pulled down money toward teacher’s base salaries,” Gould said.
Cordova said the district’s growth has been a factor because money had to stretch further to cover the additional educators.
“We’ve grown in size, so the ProComp mill levy (tax dollars toward teacher compensation) has grown a little bit, but not as much as our teacher force,” Cordova said. “So the $33 million a year we get now has to go over a much larger number of teachers. There’s been real concern that I think is very valid around incentives that have reduced in size. That has led to real frustration.”
Breaking on bonuses
Bonuses intended to attract good teachers to hardto-serve, high-poverty schools and retain them lie at the heart of the disagreement between DPS’s and DCTA’s proposals for a better ProComp.
The district’s $20.8 million proposal does allocate more money toward base pay while cutting down on incentives, but DPS won’t compromise on $2,500 incentives for educators working in high-poverty or one of 30 “high priority” schools. The district’s plan also features a $750 annual bonus for teachers in up to 10 “distinguished schools.” Criteria to determine what a distinguished school is would be determined by the team helping design and evolve ProComp, the district said.
“We know that we have a problem recruiting and retaining teachers in these schools, and the whole purpose of ProComp was to incentivize behavior that leads to positive performance,” Superintendent Cordova said. “I think it’s a very appropriate use of funds to incentivize people to come to the schools where the need is the highest.”
DPS’s most recent proposal also committed $3 million above a cost-of-living increase put toward teacher compensation in the 2020-21 school year.
The teachers union’s $28.4 million proposal allows teachers to move across a salary schedule eight times throughout their career based on earning additional college credits, degrees and professional development. The DCTA’s plan has a $1,750 annual incentive for teaching in a Title I school and a $2,500 bonus for working in a hard-to-fill position.
“ProComp was going to be the icing on the cake to help things,” said Gould, sitting in the state’s Colorado Education Association building with bullhorns waiting in the lobby to be deployed during one of several rallies in support of teachers. “It was meant to say we’re supposed to keep the traditional salary scale robust and ProComp was extra, but year after year DPS chose to spend it other places.”
DPS top-heavy
An analysis by the education website Chalkbeat found that, compared with the statewide average, DPS is top-heavy with administration, having one administrator for every 7.5 instructional members, including teachers, librarians, nurses and others.
The district has promised heavy cuts to their central office staff to help fund teacher compensation.
Aside from the nearly $8 million separating both proposals, much of the backand-forth between DPS and DCTA has centered on whether incentives are successful in attracting and retaining educators.
Allison Atteberry, an assistant professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Education, has researched trends in student and teacher outcomes at the hands of ProComp.
Atteberry said she’s found “a pretty clear positive change in student outcomes that appears to be linked to the onset of ProComp.” Denver, the one district with ProComp, saw improvement that eluded similar districts.
Whether ProComp is helping attract and keep teachers in Denver is where it gets tricky, Atteberry said.
“Teacher retention in DPS has been on the decline for the last seven years,” Atteberry said. “I think teachers rightly see and feel there is a teacher retention problem, but the nuanced ProComp story is that the teacher retention problem is probably less bad, less pronounced than it would have been in the absence of ProComp.”
Denver teachers in the lowest 20th percentile of median growth — the way educators are measured on their effectiveness based on students’ growth in test scores — have a retention rate that dropped from 90 percent to 75 percent, according to data from 2009 to 2016. The retention rate for more highly effective teachers fell from 95 to 88 percent, Atteberry said.
The implication, Atteberry said, was that highly effective teachers are more likely to earn the incentives and are therefore less likely to leave.
Cost of living
Bill Slotnik is the founder and executive director of the Community Training and Assistance Center that helped develop, implement and evaluate ProComp. Slotnik said the discord between the union and the district is inevitable based on circumstances outside of ProComp’s control.
“As cost of living goes up and Denver has gone through the real estate boom, you can see why these issues are coming up,” Slotnik said. “Circumstances have changed as the compensation approach in Denver continues to evolve.”
Slotnik described ProComp as a living document that needed to evolve along with its school district.
Gonring thinks the teachers union and district are re-hashing old arguments about incentives and pay linked to educational attainment when they should be figuring out modern ways to move forward.
“As someone so intimately involved in how this started, my profound disappointment lies in the fact that, as intended, the system has not improved over time,” Gonring said.
“We are still having 20thcentury debates in the 21st century. I hope the good people in the union and the district come together and push things into the 21st century in the same way that the creators of ProComp did things that no school district and union had done before. Regardless of your pay system, if you have to work two jobs to make it, you’re going to be angry and frustrated. I completely get the frustration. I’m sitting here trying to think of places that have figured it out.” Elizabeth Hernandez: 303-954-1311, ehernandez@denver post.com or @ehernandez