The $14.5 million program, which immediately replaces a model with lower incentives, would distribute up to $3,000 annually per teacher and up to $25,000 for senior administrators.

Abelardo Saavedra, the Houston superintendent of schools, praised the vote, saying that it ''will ensure that the academic growth of each child is important and will be compensated.'' Houston business leaders also supported the change.

But Gayle Fallon, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents about 40 percent of the district's 12,300 teachers, condemned the program as misguided. In its place, Ms. Fallon called for across-the-board raises to lift Houston from what she said was the low-paying end of area school districts.

''No one has been able to show us one ounce of research that paying teachers for test scores improves performance,'' she said.

The 9-to-0 vote at the monthly board meeting of the Houston Independent School District, the largest district in the state, with 210,000 children, opened a new front in the long-running national dispute over teacher merit pay and excited particular emotion in a city bruised by a cheating scandal that called some schools' test results into question.

Critics were quick to compare Houston's plan with one adopted in November in Denver after much study and consultation with the teachers' union there. Other programs have been tried, with varying success, in Cincinnati; Rochester; and elsewhere in New York and Kentucky, educators said.

Houston has had a teacher pay-performance program in place since 2000, but officials said the latest version was an effort to tie the rewards more closely to student gains attributable not only to schools but to individual teachers.

The pay incentives are to be based on three components, or ''strands.''

One will reward teachers based on how much their school's test scores have improved compared with the scores of 40 other schools with similar demographics around the state. Another will compare student progress on the Stanford 10 Achievement test and its Spanish-language equivalent to that of students in similar classrooms in the Houston district. The third measure will be student progress on the statewide Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test, as compared with that in similar Houston classrooms.

About half the district's teachers will be eligible for stipends in all three categories, for a total of $3,000. The system's 305 principals with the best-achieving teachers could earn as much as $6,000 in merit pay, and the 19 executive principals and five regional superintendents will be eligible for up to $25,000.

But some teachers who addressed the board on Thursday complained that the plan bypassed arts teachers and others whose subjects were not covered by the tests.

Andrew Gass, a lawyer, said the plan ''fails to reward teachers of special ed students or pre-K or kindergarten teachers'' and ''forces teachers to teach to the test rather than focus on real academic achievement in the classroom.''

Ms. Fallon of the teachers' union said the board would do better to raise the starting salary of teachers, at $36,050 the lowest of 10 major districts in the area. Mr. Saavedra, the superintendent, acknowledged that ''the salary schedule needs attention'' but said the position of Houston's teachers improved markedly with seniority.

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York, contrasted the Houston plan unfavorably with the one adopted in Denver. That plan offers the system's 4,300 teachers a choice of enrolling in a merit pay program or accepting standard raises, although new hires are automatically in the merit pay plan. So far, 735 teachers have chosen the merit pay option, said a Denver school spokesman, Mark Stevens.

But in 1999 the Texas Education Agency began investigating Houston and other districts because of suspicious results on the statewide test, then called TAAS. Last year, the Houston school board said it had found evidence of cheating at four schools and testing irregularities at seven more. A half-dozen teachers were fired, and several principals were demoted or reprimanded.

Correction: January 14, 2006, Saturday An article yesterday about expanded merit pay for Houston teachers misstated the affiliation of a union leader, Gayle Fallon, who opposed the program. She is president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, not the United Federation of Teachers.