An influential citizens group subcommittee has largely agreed with Denver Public Schools in its dispute with the Denver Classroom Teachers Association over how –and when – to revamp the groundbreaking ProComp teacher compensation system.

The A-Plus Denver Finance and Facilities Subcommittee agreed unanimously Thursday that:

• a substantially greater share of the $25 million annual taxpayer contribution should fund bonuses than is currently the case;

• that meaningful changes should be made sooner rather than later;

• that more money should be funneled to teachers in the first 11 years of their careers;

• and that more of the ProComp trust fund should be spent each year. That fund will contain $87 million by the end of next school year.

These are draft recommendations, which must be approved by the whole committee before becoming final.

Also, panel members concluded that “most voters would be surprised, and some outraged” to learn that the vast majority of ProComp money goes to building teacher salaries permanently rather than to one-time bonus payments. DPS says 98 percent of ProComp expenditures thus far have gone to “salary-building” elements of the plan. The DCTA says the figure is much lower.

Some sub-committee members even questioned whether ProComp is salvageable. “Is this a tool worth having at all?” co-chair John Hereford mused. “If it’s not what voters expected, not effective and expensive to administer, should we pull the plug if it’s not fixable?”

The sub-committee will draft a report containing these conclusions in the next few weeks. How influential the report will be is an open question. But the broader A-Plus group is co-chaired by former Denver mayors Wellington Webb and Federico Peña, and contains heavy hitters from the business and philanthropic sectors.

ProComp, passed by voters in 2005, pumps new money into Denver teacher pay. The “results-based” boosts the salaries of teachers who meet student achievement objectives they write, who receive satisfactory evaluations from their supervisors, and who successfully complete “professional development units.” It also pays bonuses to teachers who work in challenging, high-poverty schools or teach in hard-to-fill positions.

The compensation system has been the focus of renewed attention over the past several weeks because DPS and DCTA are mired in a contract dispute, the lion’s share of which is over a district proposal to make substantive changes to ProComp. Bargaining has reached an impasse, and feelings are running so high that DCTA leadership took the unprecedented step in May of  passing a vote of no-confidence against Supt. Michael Bennet.

Read stories here and here for more details about the dispute.
 
Whatever the true ratio of salary-building to bonus (and ProComp experts not affiliated with either side insist the district figure is much closer to the truth), the bonus portion needs to be significantly higher, subcommittee members said.

“I’m not confident the general public understood that base-building would be 90 percent” of ProComp, said panel member Sarah McCarthy.

Phil Gonring, a senior program officer with the Rose Community Foundation, which pumped millions of dollars in developing ProComp, urged moderation in making changes to the balance between salary building and bonuses.

“DPS is competing in a labor market with other professions and other school districts,” he said. It’s important that teachers know that a substantial portion of their wages will be predictable “so that they can pay mortgages and send their kids to college,” Gonring said. Although ProComp was designed to lure teachers to DPS, putting too much of the kitty into bonuses could actually act as a disincentive to teachers, he said.

“While moving the ball more toward bonuses is probably the right thing to do, by how much is best left to the experts,” Gonring said.

Bennet pointed out that the district pays teachers about $240 million per year in non-Pro-Comp salary, and last year’s ProComp pay-out totaled just $7 million.

Still, he said, Gonring’s point is “very well taken. We exist in an imperfect labor market. We need a mix between base-building and bonuses, or (teachers) aren’t going to accept it.”

Even in its far-from-perfect current incarnation, Bennet said, ProComp “is a departure from the way people in this profession have been paid.”

  

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