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Superintendent Peter Gorman's next big school reform push can't take flight without support from the people who could lose the most from it: his teachers.
Gorman's new four-year road map for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools includes a call to scrap a time-honored tenet of American education - the practice of linking higher teacher pay to seniority and advanced degrees.
Instead, he wants a "pay-for-performance" plan that ties salaries to students' year-to-year academic progress. It could mean sweeping changes in pay for CMS' 9,300 teachers, and would rewrite the way schools define classroom effectiveness.
"I expect teachers will be a little uncomfortable with this," Gorman told reporters after unveiling the plan in his annual State of the Schools speech.
"It's different. It's change. It's hard. ... We're going into somewhat uncharted territory here, but we think it's the way to go."
Mary McCray, head of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators, said some veteran teachers will feel wronged by such a switch.
"You will have some who will say, 'I worked for my advanced degrees simply because I'm not paid enough,'" McCray said. "In some districts (pay-for-performance) is working, but it's working because the teachers are given the option" of switching to it.
Gorman said he plans to make changes "with our teachers, not to our teachers."
He has been eyeing the concept for years. CMS sought and won passage in 2007 of a law allowing the school system to try a performance-pay plan as an alternative to the state's seniority-driven salary scale.
Teachers' associations initially opposed the legislation, said state Sen. Charlie Dannelly, a Mecklenburg Democrat and former school principal who was a primary sponsor of the bill. He said they relented after language was included to require approval from a majority of affected teachers.
"I think that's what brought them on board," he said. "The probability of the bill's passing would have been slimmer" without them. It will take several years to get CMS' plan in place. It remains unclear how much of teachers' pay would be tied to performance, or exactly how student progress would be graded. Gorman said some questions could still require clarification from legislators or other state officials.
He added that he and all other employees will be subject to pay-for-performance rules. He said that's necessary to push top CMS students higher and close racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.
The move plunges the district into the thick of one of the nation's hottest education trends. Many education leaders - including U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan - say the traditional civil-service-type pay plans do little to keep the best teachers in classrooms. Millions in grants and federal money are riding on the quest to find ways of identifying and rewarding teachers who best help kids learn.
But many of the early reform efforts exploded into teacher anger and political controversy over the fairness of the new plans. Gorman counts CMS among a second wave hoping to learn from the pioneers' mistakes.
He will implement the change over the next four years as the centerpiece of "Strategic Plan 2014: Teaching Our Way to the Top." It's the second of his long-range road maps for guiding CMS's 176 schools and 20,000 employees.
In his speech, he cited statistics showing CMS students' scores have jumped in recent years on key state tests. CMS' black and poor students, who once lagged their peers in Wake County and statewide, now outperform them.
Still, much work remains. He said 9,709 CMS students entered eighth grade in August, but a third of them - some 3,300 - won't graduate with their peers in 2014 if nothing changes.
Many of the dropouts, he said, will be poor or minority students.
"Suppose that UPS and FedEx decided they'd only deliver two-thirds of the packages they get," he said in the speech. "Two-thirds doesn't cut it in those areas ... and it doesn't cut it in education, either."
The new plan comes as five newly elected representatives prepare to take seats on the nine-member school board. The five said they like what they heard, but know they'll face big challenges working out details of performance pay.
"I think he's spot-on with the effective teachers," said member-elect Tim Morgan. "Obviously this is the 30,000-foot view. Now we need to get down into the weeds."
Richard McElrath, a retired teacher, sounded a cautious note. He said if performance rewards are the same for teaching in high-poverty and low-poverty schools, there's no incentive for teachers to volunteer for the tougher assignment.
"We've got to be extremely careful in how we're actually going to get this done," he said.
Gorman says he wants to see additional pay for more challenging assignments, including schools with larger numbers of needy students and subject areas that are hard to fill.
School board member Joe White, a retired CMS teacher and coach, endorsed the change: "It's not how many degrees you have, it's how you perform in that room full of children."
Lindalyn Kakadelis, a former CMS board member who is now director of the conservative N.C. Education Alliance, predicted the legislature will be Gorman's biggest hurdle.
"This is what needed to be done a long time ago," Kakadelis said. "If he doesn't have his hands tied (by the state), we'll see a remarkable difference."
McCray, the teacher's association leader, was already looking ahead to possible discussions in Raleigh.
"It's going to have to be changed in the legislature," she said. "And you know how Raleigh goes - at a snail's pace."
