Can Teacher Incentive Pay Close Achievement Gap?

Opponents of merit pay for teachers, including the powerful teachers' unions, say bonuses based on student performance will go mostly to white, wealthy schools -- where students perform better on standardized tests.

(ABC News)

That's exactly what happened in Orlando, Fla., according to an analysis by a local newspaper. The Orlando Sentinel found teachers in wealthier white schools were twice as likely to get bonuses.

So Chicago is focusing its bonuses only on poor, minority schools, where teacher turnover is as high as 30 percent a year.

"In the inner city you have to be more than just a teacher," said Griffin, the teacher who was offered the bonus. "You have to be a teacher, you have to be a counselor, you have to be a social worker. ... And oftentimes we have teachers who come in and it's more than they can handle. And what they do is they go to where it's easier to teach."

That usually means teaching in richer neighborhoods.

Chicago's experiment involves not only paying for performance, but also assigning master teachers like Griffin to help her colleagues become better teachers.

Teaching children in schools like Griffin's is a tall order. Many children start school already behind because they get little support at home.

"There are students that have come into kindergarten who can't write their names," Griffin said, "don't recognize colors, they don't know the shapes."

Yet the stakes are high. If the schools fail kids like eighth grader Niva Williams, who lives with her grandmother and nine siblings and cousins, the future is not bright.

"They're gonna fall behind," her grandmother Irene Williams says. "They're gonna eventually drop out. They're gonna eventually be on drugs, maybe get pregnant.  Or whatever. ... I've seen that happen."

Failure at school could doom such children to what's called the "cradle-to-prison pipeline." Veronica Griffin knows how likely that is to happen.

"Absolutely," she said. "My husband is a correctional officer for a federal prison and so we have conversations all the time about what I see here and what he sees there -- and how what I see here ultimately leads to what he sees on a daily basis."