GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The Independent Budget Office’s latest suggestion for how to cut costs at the Department of Education is to cut a performance pay program for school administrators that the Bloomberg administration convinced the principals union to accept.

Since 2007, the department has distributed about $6 million a year to principals and assistant principals on the basis of their schools’ progress report scores. Last year, 275 administrators — including some who were under investigation at the time — took home $5.7 million, with individual rewards as high as $25,000,  for principals at the top 1 percent of schools. Department officials said today that this year’s bonuses, based on 2011-2012 progress reports, are in the process of being paid out now.

In its annual “Options” report listing ways for the city to save funds and raise revenue, the IBO argues that the performance pay might be better off conserved. The annual report is meant to inform city government officials as they head into their final negotiations before adopting a budget for the 2014 fiscal year. The education department, which takes up about a quarter of the city’s planned spending, was listed in 14 of the 80 suggestions this year.

For each cost-cutting idea, the IBO lists arguments that supporters and opponents might make. For the performance pay idea, the report notes, ”Proponents might argue that the more weight that is placed on the Progress Reports, the more incentive there is for administrators and teachers to ‘teach to the test’ and even to manipulate data. Moreover, the remaining measurement problems in the Progress Reports might imply that the basis for awarding the bonuses is flawed.” (more…)

A screenshot from the Daily News’ livestream coverage.

Joe Lhota wants to bring performance-based pay for teachers to New York City finally and he thinks he can convince a union that’s long been opposed to the idea.

Making his debut on education in a forum hosted by the New York Daily News last night, Lhota said he would seek to replicate Newark’s new merit pay system if he became mayor.

He hailed the Bloomberg administration’s record on education and aligned himself with the mayor on policies of closing low-performing schools and supporting charter schools. But he said the Bloomberg legacy was incomplete.

“The one piece that’s missing is working with the union for merit pay and changing their approach,” Lhota said in an interview after the forum. (more…)

The high-profile commission charged with overhauling New York’s public schools released its first set of recommendations today, endorsing several popular education reform policies but shying away from declaring a position on others. The full report, titled “Putting Students First,” is below the jump.

Governor Cuomo, who created the commission, stopped short of endorsing its recommendations, but did express early support for several ideas, including teacher performance pay and the community school model of using schools to offer supports beyond academic preparation.

Other recommendations include expanding pre-kindergarten for students in poor districts, strengthening teacher and principal preparation programs, and extending the school day and year.

The commission did not address some prickly issues, such as teacher evaluation. Chairman Richard Parsons said that was by design, citing a recommendation from State Education Commissioner John King that the commission wait to take up the topic until its next report, scheduled for next fall. (more…)

The principals of top-ranking city schools got their annual bonuses today, adding as much as $25,000 to some school leaders’ pay.

The bonuses, guaranteed under a city agreement with the principals union, went to administrators at schools with the highest scores on the city’s progress reports. A total of 275 principals and their assistant principals received bonuses totaling more than $5 million.

The bonuses went to the principals of some of the city’s most selective schools, such as the Anderson School for gifted students and Staten Island Technical High School, one of the city’s specialized high schools. But they also went to administrators at schools that serve low-performing students, including eight transfer high schools, which had their own bonus division.

In at least a couple of cases, the bonuses went to principals who have gotten into hot water. Darlene Miller, the principal of the NYC Museum School, received a bonus despite being arrested for driving drunk over winter break, as did Ling Ling Chou, who was removed as the Shuang Wen School’s principal last summer amid multiple investigations. (more…)

The federal government is giving the city $36 million to expand a performance pay program that gives large bonuses to high-performing teachers in struggling schools.

The money is a percentage of the $442 million Teacher Incentive Fund doled out today to more than 60 groups, including states, school districts, charter school operators and non-profits. Federal officials are handing out the grants the same week as a major study of merit pay in Nashville found that offering teachers up to $15,000 bonuses had little effect on student academic achievement.

The award aims to let the city hire “master” and “turnaround” teachers for 75 low-performing schools. The two groups of teachers have full or nearly-full course loads and devote extra time to training or mentoring other teachers at their schools.

Turnaround teachers, who will work an estimated 30 hours more per year, get bonuses of 15 percent of their salaries. Master teachers work an extra 100 hours and receive 30 percent bonuses. Both categories of teacher are also required to maintain a “highly effective” rating under the state’s new teacher evaluation system, based partly on their students’ test scores. (more…)

A school system run by Comptroller William Thompson would continue experimenting with teacher “merit pay,” he said yesterday in an exclusive interview with GothamSchools. But he said he wouldn’t expect such an experiment to yield much in the way of results.

His mixed message underscores the odd reality of performance pay plans. Though the plans enjoy increasing political support, no research studies have conclusively shown they improve student achievement.

“Would I continue merit pay? Yes,” Thompson said. “Should it make the difference? Hopefully not.” (more…)

In a speech that called for more charter schools, performance pay, and tougher state standards, President Obama this morning laid to rest some doubts that he had not yet made up his mind on several education policy questions currently dividing the Democratic Party.

At the same time, Obama called for a truce in education politics, which has lately been divided by those, including Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who are pushing for aggressive changes in how schools are run and those who say that schools cannot be fully improved unless lawmakers address poverty and other roots of educational failure. He said his administration will invest heavily in initiatives that are proven to boost student achievement, such as early childhood education and home health care for young families, regardless of who supports them. And in proposing major changes to how teachers are hired, compensated, and fired, Obama never once mentioned teachers unions, regarded by some as obstacles to reform.

Thanks to the stimulus bill passed last month, the federal government is authorized to spend an unprecedented amount of money on education in the coming years. Obama said his administration would offer special funds to states that want to boost their preschool quality, develop more rigorous standards and assessments, and cut their high school dropout rates. During a visit to a Brooklyn charter school last month, Obama’s new education secretary, Arne Duncan, said he would support districts that want to build new data systems to track student achievement and pay teachers based on their students’ test scores, as New York City has done. Without mentioning New York, the president today said he supported the same initiatives.

On how some of the more controversial elements of his education plan would be put in place, Obama gave few specifics in the speech delivered in Washington, D.C., to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. (more…)

Posts on pay-for-performance plans have been popping up on the internet, but how does the debate relate to New York schools?

Here in the city, Chancellor Klein piloted a privately-funded pay-for-performance plan last year, which rewarded schools with up to $3,000 per teacher for improved student performance, with distribution of the funds handled at the school level. United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Randi Weingarten wrote in defense of the program, saying it “gives school-based educators a voice” by making participation voluntary for schools and allowing a committee at each school to distribute the funds. While most of the schools offered the program signed up for it, other teachers raised concerns that the money would be distributed unfairly within schools and that the money would be better spent on reforms like class-size reduction.

Meanwhile, the NY Times discovered the city secretly testing ways to evaluate teachers using test scores. This January, CitySue, a UFT employee, shared her experience as a representative on the DOE’s panel trying to create such a program. She reported that the panel was willing to evaluate a teacher using scores from as few as three out of the dozens or hundreds of children a teacher might see daily.

Concerns about linking teachers to test scores for evaluation purposes continue. Jonathan Halabi, a teacher who programs class assignments for his school, long suspected that the DOE was trying to link teachers to individual students in order to make tenure and pay decisions. He believes that problems with the high school scheduling software at the start of school this year occurred because of this attempted change to the program, not because of server overload, as the DOE claimed.

Merit pay, also known as performance pay, keeps turning up on the ed blogs and in the news. How do merit pay plans work? And, coming soon, how does the merit pay debate affect New York City schools?

The gist of performance pay is that districts offer teachers increased pay on the basis of student achievement and other measures of success, often in return for weakened job security. Plans vary: some reward individual teachers, others reward schools, some are based largely on test scores, some include peer and administrator evaluations, and some offer pay increases for taking on extra responsibilities such as mentoring new teachers, or for teaching in a high-needs school or subject area.

A 2007 New York Times article noted teachers’ increasing openness to merit pay programs, especially those involving teacher input and collaboration with their unions. Still, the Times pointed out, many teachers in Texas and Florida rejected merit pay plans, citing concerns about divisiveness, unfairness to teachers of high-needs students, and simplistic evaluations. Educators often say they are insulted by the idea that a little extra cash will increase their motivation to help struggling students.

Paul Tough has written extensively about teacher pay-for-performance plans on his Schoolhouse Rock blog at Slate. He launched last week with a look at political pressure on Barack Obama to push increased teacher pay but decreased job security, then spent the rest of the week examining existing performance pay programs. Tough summarized Michelle Rhee’s proposed salary plan for DC teachers, which would increase salaries across the board, do away with tenure rights, and create an opt-in performance pay program while phasing out the traditional pay scale. Rhee has warned that if teachers reject her plan, she will turn, instead, to tougher evaluations and licensing requirements, making it easier to fire teachers. (more…)