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One of the most important new merit pay programs for teachers and principals in the nation is occurring in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, school district.

The program is called Leadership for Educators’ Advanced Performance (LEAP).

The Obama administration has granted $1.9 million for a pay-for-performance program in six pilot schools for the 2009-2010 school year. In later years, ten extra schools will be added. This funding is large enough to allow very significant raises for effective teachers.

The Teacher Incentive Fund which provides this money was established in 2006 under the Bush administration.

“The LEAP initiative will have four main goals:

### Creation of a compensation system for teachers and principals that takes student achievement gains and regular classroom observations into account;

### Help support recruitment and retention of qualified teachers and principals in hard-to-staff schools and subject areas;

### Align and improve district systems to build teacher and principal capacity, and

### Develop the district's capacity to extend and sustain the pilot across the whole district.”

If you think that this sounds a lot like Rudy Crew’s School Improvement Zone (SIZ), you're right.

The SIZ was a state-of-the-art program which was even better in inception than the Charlotte-Mecklenburg program because Crew’s program included ousting ineffective teachers.

The SIZ was never properly implemented because not enough ineffective teachers were moved out of the lowest-scoring schools.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg is receiving technical support in implementing their merit pay system from the Community Training and Assistant Center (CTAC) of Boston which also helped the Denver public schools in developing their ProComp system.

Charlotte-Mecklenberg is using Denver’s ProComp as one model for their own program.

Some members of the M-DCPS School Board are interested in implementing a program like ProComp in Miami, and it might be a good idea to bring CTAC in as a consultant on this.

CTAC has existed for thirty years and has assisted hundreds of local agencies in improving their programs through research studies and staff training.

Given that Denver is the model for Charlotte-Mecklenburg, we should send an M-DCPS delegation including School Board members, administrators and UTD leaders to Denver to learn more about ProComp.

This article by Brian Peterson, editor of the daily newsletter, Miami Education Review, and a history teacher at Florida International University, is part of the Sunday series, "Ed News, Here and Everywhere." The views expressed in this series belong wholly to Peterson and do not necessarily accord with those of TD's editor. Click HERE to read all of Peterson's contributions to TD, including his ten-part series, "A Program for MDCPS."