around for 5-6 years and still don't have a solution. We'd like to implement a system, and we're legally allowed to deviate from the set salary schedule to implement performance pay, but there are hundreds of nuances and issues that you have to consider to implement it fairly.

For example, one teacher may be a better teacher but get a batch of students one year that come from a disproportionate percentage of single parent homes. A poorer teacher may get a batch with lots of stable homes. The poorer teacher will do "better" based on student data because of who he or she is teaching. If you're an average 3rd grade teacher but have a fantastic 2nd grade teacher feeding students into your classroom, you're going to look better than you should because you're getting students that are already advanced and performing above grade level.

If you implement performance pay, how do you determine high performance for shop teachers, art teachers, and music teachers (by law if we implement performance pay, all teachers in the district have to be eligible to earn it)? What about special education teachers that have severe limits on their students?

The best we could come up with was applying a performance factor to groups of teachers. We've kicked around the idea of measuring building performance and giving a performance bonus to all teachers in a high-performing building. We've also considered separating out departments, but that leads you back to the question of how do you measure high performance in non-traditional classroom subjects (art, music, band, etc), and you unfairly penalize teachers whose job description specifically includes working with low-performing students exclusively (special ed, Title I, etc.).

It's a nice idea in theory, but in application, it's nearly impossible to implement within the legal requirements that we have to operate off a set salary schedule for all teachers with performance bonuses for teachers who meet certain criteria, but all teachers have to be included in performance pay bonuses.