GREENSBORO — Teachers could see major changes in how they are paid if North Carolina wins its bid for nearly $470 million from Washington.

Gov. Bev Perdue submitted the state’s application for a Race to the Top grant. Race to the Top is a program included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and will provide states with a four-year grant to fund major education reform efforts.

Perdue’s plan focuses on improvement in two areas: developing qualified teachers and leadership, and improving low-performing schools and districts.

Source: The Greensboro News & Record

I am encouraged that Governor Perdue is seeking to reform public education and is looking at ways to improve poor performing schools through the use of incentives for results.  I feel this shift in education philosophy is long overdue and needs to be tested in our state hopefully sooner rather than later.

My concern is that the performance issue and pay incentives will be focused on the critical needs areas of education while other hard working educators will be left to fend for whatever is left over after funding elementary education, math, science, and special needs classrooms.  If our state does not implement a fair performance based plan, a "caste system" will develop within our schools which will define subject areas and grade levels as more important than others.

Furthermore, the archaic and unexplainable system of recording student and school growth currently used by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is a whole new can of worms that must be reformed before any performance based system can be implemented.  As an educator, it is difficult to comprehend being evaluated for my curriculum area based on how a student performed in a previous class of a different subject matter.

I have been in meetings with county and state education bureaucrats and have never been given a solid explination to how the current evaluation model for growth accurately reflects school, teacher, and student performance.  The standard answer is, "statistics show the model is accurate," but when pressed further these bureaucrats can not produce evidence to support their statements.

North Carolina needs to develop an accurate model for growth before if performance based pay is to be implemented within the teacher salary scale.