The top two Republicans in the Missouri legislature want K-12 public school teachers to be paid based on their performance.
The House Speaker and President Pro-Tem talked about the concept in the first few days of the legislative session. Charlie Shields, the president of the Missouri Board of Education, said he's encouraged to hear that conversation, but the challenge it poses is that it would require a change to the state constitution.
"For state or political subdivisions like school districts, you can't have different pay rates for people doing the same work," Shields said. "You'd have to change the constitution to do that. So if you want to do performance pay or merit pay, if you wanna do bonuses, things like that for high-performing educators, you're gonna have to make a change to the constitution first, go out to a vote of the people."
Shields said he thinks the proposal will incentivize more people to become teachers — something that's currently being attempted with general pay raises and shortened weeks.
"For other folks that are considering the profession that look at what's the level of opportunity in the profession, and they just look at the salary schedule and say 'that's as far as I can go,' they make a decision not to enter the profession."
But, he said, if they understand that by performing better they can make more money, they may be more likely to join. "I think that attracts another group of folks into the profession. I think that would be very, very, very helpful," he said
Some Democratic opponents say instead of performance-based pay, all teachers should be paid more. Missouri has the lowest starting teacher salary in the country. Shields said he agrees with them, and that it shouldn't be an either-or situation.
"I think we need to pay teachers better up and down the salary schedule," he said. "And that was one that recommendations -- Blue Ribbon Commission raised minimum salaries, but create a separate fund to begin to pay all teachers more. So I think that's, that's the first part."
As for how exactly teachers would be evaluated for performance-based pay raises — that's still unclear.
"The key is going to be how you implement it and how you design it," Shields said. "So I think there's a way to design performance pay, that can be fair and not subjective, but objective based on data."
The legislature is also dealing with partisan debates about public schooling over topics like Critical Race Theory and book bans.
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