Houston seeks to rights its wrong. In an effort to right the mistakes from last year's performance pay debacle (if you don't recall, it's the one where some of the worst teachers seemed to get all the payouts), Houston school board members have signed off on a new and improved plan. The new plan, under the catchy moniker ASPIRE (Accelerating Student Progress, Increasing Results and Expectations) ups the ante for the bonuses teachers can earn (to $7,300 from a $6,000 maximum under the old plan), and is intended to be more transparent. Trying to avoid last year's embarrassment when winning teachers names were published in the Houston Chronicle for all to see, teachers will now be able to review their students' performance in advance to find out if they are eligible for the award. And no, we don't understand either how advance notice is supposed to reduce the losers' embarrassment.

More importantly, ASPIRE rectifies the fundamental problem that caused the downfall of the old plan, producing outcries over which teachers proved to be the winners and losers. ASPIRE awards are determined on the basis of three years' of student growth, rather than just one year, as it was under the old plan. Three years is what is statistically necessary to capture a teacher's true performance.

ASPIRE also provides strong school-level awards. If a campus is in the top half of all schools in the district, teachers get a bonus. If students in a given school make greater academic gains than 75 percent of the district schools at the same grade level, teachers earn an even higher bonus. Though individual teachers now get to opt out of the plan--providing them with a way to claim "conscientious objector" to the very idea of performance pay--their students' test scores will still be counted towards assessing campus progress. The highest awards will be given to teachers working in core academic areas, but other teachers in non-core academic areas are still eligible for up to $3,650, roughly half of the maximum bonus.

Local union officials still aren't thrilled with the new plan. Houston Federation of Teachers' President Gayle Fallon describes the program as going from bad to worse and creating two classes of teachers, the "haves" and then those left with the crumbs.

Blaming the messenger in Florida. As part of the Orlando Sentinel's obituary for Florida's now defunct performance-pay 'STAR' program, the newspaper revealed some rather disturbing results emerge from the program's implementation in Orange County. It found that teachers working at predominantly white and affluent schools were twice as likely to get a bonus as teachers from poor and minority schools.

What's interesting here is that the performance pay program is what is being blamed for this phenomenon. With a relatively straightforward reward system premised on a combination of gains in student achievement and good teacher evaluations (50 percent each), the program merely disclosed existing inequities in how schools get staffed--it didn't create them.

Instead of trashing a program that revealed systemic inequities, the state might have responded with the incentives needed to keep or lure better teachers into high-poverty schools. (And, yes, we remain firmly convinced that the federal 'comparability' solution that dictates staffing arrangements is the wrong solution for a real problem).

While STAR may have simply disclosed inequities, the newly designed 'MAP' program looks to make matters only worse. MAP shifts the bonus structure away from rewarding gains in student achievement to rewarding high overall scores. While the state has instructed districts to "balance academic proficiency and learning gains," the new formula tilts the balance, giving more weight to high scores than gains.

Union-led performance initiative goes live in Chicago. The Windy City is now officially the largest school district in the nation to experiment with a sensible pay combo, targeting effective teachers in high needs schools. Starting with 10 of its neediest schools this year, the district is set to add 30 more in the next three years. Chicago's REAL program (and we refuse to tell you what those letters stand for) is a jiggered version of the national TAP model started by the Milken Family Foundation, but which focuses less on individual teacher performance in the immediate future, in order to first provide professional development to bring weak teachers up to speed. Best of all, the design comes straight from the Chicago Teachers Union, one local union that is learning to play ball.