Innovative Ideas
in Educator Compensation Reform

Educator and Community Support

Without support from educators and the community, efforts to design and implement an alternative compensation system likely will be fruitless. The most successful systems involve and seek the input of teachers, principals, and district administrators; engage community members; and keep all stakeholders informed during the design and implementation of the system.

What Is This?
Why Is This Important?
What Are the Benefits?
What Are Some Implementation Tips?
What Are the Selection Criteria?

What Is This?

Gaining support from educators and community members includes engaging these stakeholders through the use of communication strategies that consider the stakeholders' relationship to and understanding of the changes to the compensation system and how it will impact them (Community Training and Assistance Center, 2004). When designing and implementing an alternative compensation system, educators and community members should be involved in the development of the system's processes, components, and benefits. To this end, an effective plan for engaging and communicating with stakeholders should be devised. An effective engagement plan considers how to meaningfully involve parents and community members (Mediratta & Fruchter, 2003). An effective communication plan is one that continuously assesses messages, modes of communication, and resources to ensure that they accurately are facilitating reform progress.

Why Is This Important?

Changes to the status quo of educational systems like compensation can create fear and distrust among stakeholders if they do not fully understand how the changes may affect their daily lives and the lives of others within the educational organization. Altering the way educators are paid in the absence of an effective communication plan often can lead to discord within a school or district as teachers and administrators are "pulled apart by deeply entrenched fears, suspicions, prejudices, and turf battles" (Carr, 1995). Inadequate engagement and communication with educators and community members can result in confusion and heighten fears. These fears turn into anger, cynicism, or skepticism, which creates resistance to change (D'Aprix, 1996), and education reforms fail.

What Are the Benefits?

Deep and broad changes, such as the implementation of alternative educator compensation systems require effectively engaging and communicating with educators and community members. A plan for engaging and communicating with educators and community members, developed in partnership with teacher representatives and administrators, is essential to all stages of educator compensation reform—conceptualization, design, and implementation. Benefits of such a plan include the following:

Stakeholder involvement, knowledge, and understanding of the program or change
Greater knowledge and understanding of the total system—operations, challenges, strengths, and weaknesses
Reduced barriers to acceptance within individuals
Less intense or frequent opposition
More positive peer discussions about the change
Community support of the change
Faster adoption rate

What Are Some Tips for Implementation?

When seeking educator and community support to alter an educator compensation system, it is important to keep the following tips in mind:

Have an Engagement and Communication Plan. Having a plan in place helps implementers focus communication efforts on the most important tasks and set priorities, clarify communication objectives and target audiences, leverage communication strategies with organizational goals and initiatives, and ensure a common vision with regard to communicating about the project.
Engage and Communicate at All Stage. Effective communication and stakeholder involvement should occur at all stages of altering an educator compensation system—conceptualization, design, and implementation.
Foster Understanding. Helping stakeholders understand the changes throughout the process provides an opportunity to address the concerns of stakeholders within and outside the system.
Make Connections. Communicate how and why altering the educator compensation system will support school, district, and state goals for student learning.

What Are the Selection Criteria?

These criteria are applied to proposed innovative ideas to ensure that the highlighted approach is indeed innovative, based in the research literature, and representative of education reform in practice. Because innovative ideas, by their very nature, represent new approaches to education reform, the research base frequently has not kept pace with the need to experiment with new approaches to education reform. The following criteria were developed and are applied to ensure transparency in the decision-making process when labeling an idea as innovative.

Is there documentation that the idea met local school reform needs or changed local practice for the better?
Did the idea evolve out of multiple viewpoints and perspectives?
Is the idea part of a comprehensive communication strategy?
Was the idea communicated effectively to key stakeholder groups to ensure successful implementation?
Was there a plan to ensure fidelity of implementation?
Is the idea grounded in a research-based theory of action?
Was the idea critical to the success of a larger set of communication strategies?
Did the idea foster two-way communication to ensure that stakeholders understand messages and materials?
Did the idea increase the change team's readiness to communicate key messages, deal with stakeholder resistance, or work with the news media?

References

This page last updated on: April 28, 2008