By Francis Koster

Special to the Salisbury Post

Mr. John Hood’s column in the Aug. 16 Post (“Teacher pay increase pilot programs get tested”) talked about what he viewed as an admirable step by the state legislature to improve education. Mr. Hood’s column meets only one of the three parts of the oath sworn in court: “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. He did tell the truth when he described three new laws passed in the 2016 legislative session that are supposed to “test” the effectiveness of performance pay in public schools. He did not, however “tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

He said that the first program would supply “$10 million to provide bonuses to the top-performing 25 percent of reading teachers statewide, as well as the top-performing 3rd grade reading teachers within each school district.” This law provides bonuses to teachers of students who showed the greatest improvement.

He said “another pilot program, budgeted at $4.3 million annually,” will give the teacher of every high-schooler who gets a 3 or higher on their Advanced Placement (AP) test a $50 bonus. And for every student who gets a 4 or higher on another test called the International Baccalaureate exam, the teacher will get another $50.

All of this is the truth.

Here is what he did not say — the whole truth: Each of these programs rewards teachers of children from well-off, educated households, and diverts it from those teaching challenged students.

Students who take the AP test are already doing well — or they would not be taking the test in the first place. The same is true for the teachers whose students take the International Baccalaureate exam; they would not be taking the exam unless they were college bound. So that $4.3 million went to reward teachers of students already on the road to success.

The single best predictor of student test scores is the income level of their parents. Good teaching can help those less fortunate try to gain equality — but if you are rewarding a teacher because their students improve a lot, you are usually not talking about the less fortunate. What Mr. Hood did not say is that if you take a pool of students, some rich and some poor, and give them extra attention, the kids from rich homes will show greater improvement. So teachers of well-off kids (at well-off schools) will get the majority of the benefit from the $10 million pot set aside to reward “top performing teachers.”

What Mr. Hood did not say is that when Governor McCrory goes on television and claims that he raised teacher pay, $14.3 million of that taxpayer money was shunted to pay the teachers of well-off, academically successful kids mostly at affluent schools — and not invested where the real challenge is.

Francis Koster lives in Kannapolis.