Green Dot Public Schools received a Gates Grant with four other Charter Management Organizations (CMO) in California

to create systemic change in student achievement and teacher evaluation. Over the past 3 years, the CMOs have been working together to transform education as we know it. This has become known as The College Ready Teaching Promise (TCRP). Part of the development of TCRP has included identifying 29 indicators of success in leading to student achievement in four year institutions. Teachers are coached on this 29 indicators on a 4 point rubric to improve their instruction and to make for a more rigorous and robust learning experience for students. A majority of teachers are excited about the move away from a constant emphasis on improving test scores and a return to teaching to the whole child. Students need to be able to tackle real life problems not just perform well on a multiple choice test. There is little resistance from our organization in the need for change. The resistance came when teachers salaries became attached to the systemic change. Teachers want their students to go on to university and succeed in life, but they are leery about attaching a quantitative evaluation to a pay check. In order to give teachers an opportunity to speak their minds and see the research, multiple focus groups were formed. Any teacher was welcome to attend these evening focus groups as well as receive a small monetary stipend. At the focus group dealing with teachers salaries, there were initially a lot of teachers that showed up to voice their opinions. At one particular meeting, the teachers were shown research about how a standard step and salary column does not equate to the higher paid teachers producing better performing students. In fact, after five to 6 years, there is very little growth that appears in a teachers ability to produce higher performing students. Research also shows that higher education degrees, such as a masters or doctorate in which traditional school districts pay teachers extra money, do not equate to producing higher performing students.

It was suggested that using the teacher rubric of 29 indicators, teachers would receive an overall observation score. The statisticians at the district would create benchmarks of performance bands for the teachers. The goal is for 60% of the teachers within the organization to reach the highest performing band by their 6th year in the organization. It was also suggested that teachers could reach the highest salary by their 6th year since they were able to produce high performing students. The teachers were worried that there was no research to show that high performance on the 29 indicators created by our CMOs would correlate to high test scores. In response to this, performance pies were created in which multiple measures became accountable for a teachers overall performance leading to merit based pay. The meeting had the potential to become quite contentious, but was run in such a way that teachers were able to talk/vent in table groups, and then voice their concerns to the whole group, and big ideas were added to charts. The results of the focus group were then taken back to Evaluation and Advisory committees. This cycle of feedback and suggestions for change continued throughout the year culminating with the union negotiating committee including new language in the teacher contract attaching the teachers salaries to performance. Despite the heated meetings throughout the year, or perhaps because of the opportunity for these focus group meetings, the majority of the union members voted to ratify the contract and include merit based pay as measured by multiple measures.