Annual plan can take pain out of bargaining

Someday, public entities like schools will reward their employees for something other than showing up for work every day.

Imagine how much stronger our education system would be — and the tremendous uptick to our quality of life — if we zeroed in on student achievement as the primary measuring stick to evaluate and reward educators. When we talk about student achievement, we aren’t necessarily talking about how many of Miss Whimple’s third-graders make As and Bs. We would need to look at how much progress they made under Miss Whimple’s tutelage.

Alas, we’re not there yet. Local negotiations are underway between school districts and union employees. As always, the mantra for more money reverberates to the tune of rewarding those who have been there longest. While loyalty and experience within a system are certainly evaluation criteria deserving consideration, they fall far short of examining results. So what’s a school district to do? Cave in to union demands? Refuse to negotiate in good faith and incur the wrath of the people on the front lines charged with one of the greatest responsibilities in society? Compromise until nobody’s happy?

There’s another option that should take a lot of the anxiety and hurt feelings out of the process.

In 2015, the Idaho Legislature approved a bill that requires every school district to create and maintain an annual plan with measurable goals to drive student achievement. While some districts statewide have viewed these plans as just another compliance obstacle they need to hurdle, the really smart districts are recognizing that the strategic plans are useful — maybe even critical — tools to encourage and measure how much students are learning and growing. These plans can become guiding lights that lead the way to constantly improving student achievement.

Because unions tend to reward collectively rather than individually, it’s not likely that annual compensation negotiations can be tailored to reward individual teacher performance. But perhaps there’s a way to use the annual plan as an instrument to reward the whole for varying degrees of success on the student achievement front.

For example, imagine if your school district’s plan for the 2016-2017 year called for a 4 percent raise for all district employees if certain overall student achievement criteria were met. Maybe a 3 percent across-the-board raise would be projected for slightly lower gains in student achievement, and so on. The point is, much of the second-guessing and suspected ulterior motives would be removed from the negotiating process. If you outlined clear goals and accompanying rewards at the beginning, everybody — superintendents, administrators, school board members, teachers and other staff — would be aiming high, working together for the best possible outcome, with some reasonable assurance that their successful efforts would be met with tangible rewards.

With a good plan comes success and predictability — two valuable commodities that too often are lacking with the current model.