Kasich wants schools to develop bonus programs

JULIE CARR SMYTH

AP State­house Correspondent

COLUMBUS — Gov. John Kasich said Mon­day that his upcom­ing edu­ca­tion bill will give school dis­tricts the abil­ity to design pro­grams that pay bonuses to teach­ers for high stu­dent performance.

Speak­ing to reporters after a sep­a­rate bill-signing, the Repub­li­can gov­er­nor said the leg­is­la­tion is “not just a sim­ple fund­ing bill” and con­tains a host of heavy pol­icy con­cepts — includ­ing ground­work for future teacher bonus programs.

“I’m a big believer that you can pay peo­ple more who do excel­lent jobs,” Kasich said. “I would rather have it come from the bot­tom up than from the top down because if it can come from the bot­tom up, then we can get agree­ment within the dis­tricts with the school boards, the teach­ers, and every­body else — but it’s absolutely some­thing I think makes a lot of sense.”

He expects to unveil the highly antic­i­pated leg­is­la­tion before the end of the month. The bill he signed Mon­day estab­lishes new A-through-F grades for school dis­tricts and build­ings that will replace the cur­rent rank­ings from Aca­d­e­mic Emer­gency to Excel­lent with Dis­tinc­tion. The new sys­tem will be phased in as Ohio rises to meet higher per­for­mance standards.

Some teach­ers and their unions have opposed performance-based pay sys­tems that Kasich sup­ports, argu­ing that whether stu­dents do well in school can depend on fac­tors out­side a teacher’s control.

A sweep­ing col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing law that Ohio vot­ers turned back in 2011 included what would have been the first manda­tory performance-based pay sys­tem in the nation. It was among the ele­ments that most ran­kled the public.

The hand­ful of states that have tried performance-based pay pro­grams have often had trou­ble find­ing a way to offer pay raises to every­one and merit pay to only some.

Kasich pointed to the Cleve­land Schools Plan, approved last year with bipar­ti­san back­ing, which includes some­thing sim­i­lar. The gov­er­nor empha­sized that his bill would allow dis­tricts to develop the details of bonus pro­grams themselves.

“There will be things in that bill that I believe can empower local dis­tricts to make deci­sions like that,” he said.

Besides bonuses, Kasich said he hopes to incor­po­rate some of the online edu­ca­tion inno­va­tions of Google Labs’ Sebas­t­ian Thrun into his future pro­pos­als. The gov­er­nor said he met with Thrun ear­lier Mon­day and was impressed with his ideas.

“He has some ideas about some things we can do with reme­di­a­tion, some things we can do with AP (Advanced Place­ment) courses,” Kasich said. “I’ve embraced Sebas­t­ian. We are going to work aggres­sively with him.”

Kasich said he sup­ports get­ting busi­nesses “fully inte­grated with the edu­ca­tion sys­tem.” That includes allow­ing stu­dents to earn course credit for activ­i­ties related to their future pro­fes­sion and more expo­sure for future teach­ers in how to incor­po­rate real-world expe­ri­ences into their class­room activities.

Also on Mon­day, mem­bers of the State Board of Edu­ca­tion re-elected Debe Ter­har as their pres­i­dent, and she cre­ated an account­abil­ity com­mit­tee that will pro­vide pol­icy direc­tion to the Ohio Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion as it imple­ments the new A-through-F rank­ing sys­tem and other ele­ments of the new law.

Posted by AP News on Jan 14 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.