Failure bonuses: GOP legislators propose rewarding schools and teachers of students who fail to earn college credit on IB exams.

For many years, the State of Florida has paid bonuses to teachers whose students earned college credit on Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge AICE exams. The bonuses are $50 for each student who earns college credit on an exam. Teachers in high schools with “D” or “F” school grades who have at least one student with a college credit-earning grade on an IB exam earn an additional $500.

But two bills filed in the Florida Legislature for the coming session would introduce a new twist on the IB exam bonus scheme. HB 667 (McFarland) and SB 240 (Burton) would allow the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) to give IB teachers bonuses for exam grades that fail to earn college credit.

In short, the bills would authorize failure bonuses.

The bills specify that the FLDOE would have the option of designating IB exams for which a score lower than the minimum college credit-earning score of 4 (out of 7) would earn bonuses for teachers. The bills do not include any such provisions for AP or AICE – only for IB.

Teachers are not the only recipients of financial rewards for students who pass IB exams. Schools earn additional funding for each student who passes an IB exam. As in the case of teacher bonuses, under the new proposal schools could receive additional funding for students whose exam scores fell short of what is needed to earn college credit, as long as they were on exams designated by the FLDOE.

The proposal demonstrates the absurdity of the AP/IB/AICE bonus system, and its somewhat younger bonus system cousin, the CAPE program for rewarding teachers and schools for passed career and technical education industrial certification exams. The thoughtful reader might ask:

• Are those who teach AP/IB/AICE courses more valuable than those who teach reading to struggling students? The bonus system seems to say so.
• Should we block students out of AP/IB/AICE courses if they are unlikely to earn passing exam grades because they might keep the teacher from focusing her or his effort on students who are more likely to turn a profit for the school and teacher?
• Should a school’s bright students be steered into CAPE courses instead of (say) AP Physics 1 because they are more likely to yield a profit for the school by taking a CAPE test they will certainly pass than by taking an AP Physics 1 test with a 50% passing rate?

I could go on like this all evening. But what I want to say in closing instead is that the failure of Florida’s teacher compensation system is now evident to everyone on both sides of the political aisle (see SB 7000). So it is time to get serious about building a new financial framework for Florida’s teacher corps that recruits talented young people into the profession at attractive salaries (as the present system pretty much does) and provides incentives for developing and more senior teachers to stay in the system (as the present system completely fails to do). As the new bills prove, bonus gimmicks are eventually exposed for what they are. There is no substitute for a solid and attractive professional pathway for teachers.

Sarasota’s Riverview High School houses an International Baccalaureate Program that could benefit financially from the proposal to allow failure bonuses.