$13 million grant for AP teachers lost over pay dispute

Two Seattle high schools are among seven statewide that will lose a chance to add and strengthen Advanced Placement courses in math and science because a $13.2 million grant that Washington state won last year has been scrapped.

The National Math & Science Initiative (NMSI), based in Dallas, has announced it will end Washington's grant because of disagreements about how to carry it out.

NMSI declined to give specifics, but state Rep. Bill Fromhold, D-Vancouver, said the issue was how to pay teachers for the extra time they spent in training and for how well their students scored on AP exams.

NMSI wanted to pay teachers directly, he said, while Washington's collective-bargaining laws require that teacher pay be negotiated between unions and school districts.

"We worked hard to try to find middle ground," said Fromhold, who is working with the group implementing Washington's grant.

"We got caught in the middle of the grant requirements and the collective-bargaining laws in the state of Washington that have to be followed."

He didn't want to lay blame on either side, he added.

Washington was one of seven states to receive the six-year grants.

Franklin High was one of the two Seattle schools signed up to be part of the grant. West Seattle could have been the other, although it voted against accepting it, in part because of concerns about teachers receiving merit pay for student test scores, said district spokesman David Tucker. Another Seattle school likely would have been added, however, if the grant had gone forward.

The five other high schools set to receive grant funds were in the Evergreen School District in Vancouver and in the Spokane area.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided $10 million for the effort, was disappointed that Washington state couldn't find a solution, noting that some of the other states involved have teachers unions, too.

"Honestly, I can't figure out why they couldn't solve this," said Steve Seleznow, the foundation's program director for education.

The pay elements of the program were clear from the beginning, said NMSI spokeswoman Rena Pederson, and NMSI "tried to be as flexible as possible." But she said NMSI felt it needed to maintain what it felt was essential to the program's success.

But Rich Wood, spokesman for the Washington Education Association (WEA), said that outside groups can't just set up a new system for paying local teachers.

"That's not how it works in our state."

The WEA, he said, was particularly concerned about tying teacher pay directly to student test scores.

About 22 percent of the $13.2 million would have been spent on extra pay for teachers, according to NMSI.

Fromhold said he didn't learn about the pay issues until he started working with Mentoring Advanced Programs for Students (MAPS), which was administering Washington's grant. But he had been optimistic something could be worked out.

Grants in the other six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Virginia — are going forward.

Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359

or lshaw@seattletimes.com