In the program’s first year, the state gave teachers deemed “effective” or “highly effective” on their annual evaluations a total of $30 million.

“Indiana teachers and schools work each and every day to make a difference in the lives of our children,” Pence said at the time in a news release. “This commitment to excellence brightens both the futures of our young people and that of our state, and I fully support, as I did on day one in office, rewarding their tireless work.”

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Two years later, as Pence prepares to become Donald Trump’s vice president, his home state program is generating outrage.

The system, teachers and legislators say, is staggeringly unfair. A glance at the numbers shows why.

Last week, for the 2015-16 school year, teachers in one of Indiana’s wealthiest school districts, Carmel Clay Schools, received bonuses of $2,422.06.

Just miles away, teachers performing the same duties in a different but poorer Indianapolis-area district, Wayne Township, received checks with far fewer digits: $42.20.

“This is the difference between taking our children to dinner and taking them on vacation,” more than 50 Wayne Township teachers wrote in a signed open letter addressed to the Indiana legislature ridiculing the program, known as Teacher Performance Grants. “We have no doubt that teachers in these schools receiving bonuses work hard. We know many of them, and we hold them in high regard. A highly effective teacher in our school should receive the same bonus as a highly effective teacher in theirs.”

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The teacher’s letter called their paltry $42 bonus an “insult” to the work they do every day:

It is not encouraging to know our legislators feel that our work is worth such a small amount of money. We serve in a community greatly affected by poverty and hardship, and we show up every day, and we serve every student that walks through our doors. An effective teacher in our school is worth just as much as an effective teacher in any other, and one test over only a few subjects, which the State of Indiana and the Department of Education continues to mismanage year after year, should not determine the effectiveness and worth of all of our teachers. The offer of a $42 check for our efforts in comparison with the $2,400 checks for some of Indiana’s wealthiest school districts is an insult to the work we do everyday and to the community we serve. We refuse to believe that we are worth only 1.7 percent of what a teacher in Carmel is worth.

How did this happen? Here’s a rough explanation.

Only teachers rated “effective” or “highly effective” on evaluations get any bonus money, regardless of district. This was the case for the bonus-getting teachers in both Wayne Township and Carmel Clay Schools. Those who received $42 bonuses performed just as well as those who got $2,400.

The problem is that the total amount of money available to particular schools — the pot to be divided up among the teachers — is based on overall school performance as measured by both standardized tests and graduation rates.

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Here, the schools in the less affluent districts fell short, as they do compared to wealthier schools everywhere that have more resources and students from higher income families.

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So the pot available to them was minuscule by comparison and so was the pot of money to be distributed among the teachers.

As a result, high-rated teachers in the poorer districts got only a tiny fraction of the bonuses compared to the equally high-rated teachers in the wealthier districts.

(For a more detailed explanation of the formula click here.)

Lawmakers tried to prevent this egregious discrepancy by adding to the formula a caveat that allowed teachers in even poorly performing schools to earn bonus money, if their graduation rates and test scores improved by just 5 percent.

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But instead, statewide, test scores fell.

“It’s hard for anybody to think they didn’t know how this was going to turn out,” Jason Brumback, a middle school English teacher in Wayne Township and the author of the letter, told The Washington Post.

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According to one estimate, had all the allotted bonus money been divided evenly, each high-rated teacher in Indiana could have received $600.

That, Brumback said, would have been welcome this holiday season.

In the days since the bonus information went public and the teachers wrote their letter, some state legislators have defended the system’s reliance on scores from the state’s standardized test — ISTEP+ — and others have critiqued it, including at least one lawmaker who helped draft the formula and the incoming state superintendent of public instruction, Jennifer McCormick.

McCormick told Indianapolis NPR affiliate WFYI that the bonus formula “has to be changed” and that she plans to address it in the upcoming legislative session.

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One architect of the formula, State Sen. Ryan Mishler, told the radio station he was shocked by the bonus disparity across the state.

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“When we drafted it we didn’t think the gap would be as large,” Mishler, a Republican, told WFYI.

According to an analysis by the Indianapolis Star, it was some of the state’s wealthiest, most successful school districts this year that received the largest slice of the $40 million pie.

Urban school districts, like Indianapolis Public Schools and Wayne Township, saw much less.

Another 37 school districts, reported the Indy Star, were awarded no bonus funding at all.

That system, the Wayne Township teachers said in their note, sends a disturbing message: “… if you want to be respected and paid for your efforts, steer clear of poorer communities.”

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Teresa Meredith, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, agreed, telling WFYI in a statement that the system’s reliance on test scores is a “flawed premise” that leaves certain educators out.

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“It does make you question what can be done to make this more fair,” Meredith told the Indy Star. “It’s really sad that there are teachers who are doing an incredible amount of work, and they are going to get nothing.”

The teachers included a chart in their open letter, which, sourcing census data, compared the top five public school districts that received bonuses to the bottom five, excluding the ones that got nothing. It shows that the bonus-getting schools with poorer overall performance had disproportionately larger percentages of students receiving free and reduced lunches and students who live in minority communities or among a population that earns below the poverty line.

The school district in East Chicago, for example, is a suburb of the city of Chicago. It was eligible this year for money, but received none because it didn’t meet performance standards, even though, Brumback said, there were teachers there who excelled in their jobs.

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“This grant message, I think it discourages new teachers from going to work in high need areas,” Brumback told The Post.

His classroom is next door to his wife’s, who is also a middle school English teacher. Their students face challenges that kids elsewhere may not, like poverty and language barriers.

“We stayed where we are because kids in our area need the best teachers they can get, too,” he said, emphasizing his support of teachers in wealthier districts. His own kids go to school in neighboring Zionsville and, he said, they love their teachers.

“It isn’t about them,” Brumback said. “This bill was inequitable.”

And it was particularly egregious this year.

In Wayne Township, frustration with the mere $42 check — before tax — mounted quickly.

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Together, the teachers made a decision. Instead of accepting their bonuses, the 50 plus teachers who signed the letter decided to give it away instead.

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In the letter, they explained why:

We plan to donate our Performance Grant checks to the Wayne Township Education Foundation, an organization that has supported programs for students and teachers in our community for the last 30 years. Indiana’s leaders have shown that they do not believe our job is worth very much through their grant formula, but we believe differently. Rather than accept this money, which has been so poorly and derisively distributed, we each choose to donate our performance grant checks to an organization that still believes and invests in our students, teachers, and community.

Their logic was this: $42 alone didn’t amount to much, but pooled together, it could do some good.

“That money by itself doesn’t do anything great for teachers,” Brumback told The Post. “But together it can do something great for classrooms.”