Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a plan Monday to award merit pay to Chicago Public Schools principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics as critics questioned whether the program will lead to gains in student achievement.
The performance rewards—which may be based on student test scores, school climate and leadership skills, among other factors — are part of an overhaul of principal preparation and evaluation at CPS. They will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to implement a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.
“You can’t throw merit pay out there like a Hail Mary pass,” Emanuel said, emphasizing that the effort to upgrade principal performance will also include targeted recruitment, training and mentoring.
Performance pay for teachers and administrators has grown in popularity, but research has not shown a clear link between bonuses and improved student performance.
“In any profession, money is not the motivator people think it is,” said Clarice Berry, president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association. Berry said Monday’s news conference was the first time she saw the merit pay proposal and was “a little taken aback.”
“Knowing my members, in general, they are not in favor of performance pay,” Berry said.
Chicago briefly experimented with a form of merit pay through the Teacher Advancement Program, a 2007 initiative that offered bonuses to teachers and principals based on a combination of student achievement and classroom observations. Evaluations of the first two years of the program showed no increases in student test scores, although researchers cautioned that the results were preliminary.
New York City ended a three-year-old teacher performance incentive program last month after a study the city commissioned found the bonuses “had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs,” according to an article on its findings in The New York Times.
In 2010, researchers at the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education found that student test scores did not improve when 300 Nashville middle school math teachers were offered bonuses tied to the results. The study focused exclusively on whether financial incentives could produce higher test scores, and did not consider other types of training or retention efforts used in conjunction with bonus pay.
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said in a statement Monday that providing bonuses based on student achievement alone does not work.
“The research is conclusive-merit pay does not work and can have troubling side effects-cheating, narrowing of curriculum and competition between teachers where collaboration is needed,” Lewis said.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said he expected the performance bonuses will range from about $5,000 to $10,000 per principal.
The principal improvement effort will be administered by the newly created Chicago Leadership Collaborative. CPS officials said the collaborative’s operating budget is $10 million, half of which is already covered by the private donations. The remainder will be covered by CPS operating funds, although district officials did not provide details.
A small number of wealthy Chicago families have committed to helping finance the first four years of the initiative. Venture capitalist Bruce Rauner and his wife, Diana, will give $2 million. Contributing $1 million each are Chicago Board of Education member Penny Pritzker and her husband, Bryan Traubert; Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky and his wife, Liz; and Madison Dearborn Partners Co-CEO Paul Finnegan and his wife, Mary.
The announcement of the $10 million collaborative follows several weeks of actions by the school board to close what they have said is a $712 million budget deficit. To balance the budget, the board rejected a scheduled 4 percent raise for teachers and has proposed raising the property tax to the maximum level allowed under state law.
In addition to implementing performance pay for principals, CPS plans to triple triple the number of principal residency openings in the existing principal training programs at Harvard University’s Teach for America Principal Pipeline, University of Illinois at Chicago, New Leaders for New Schools and Loyola University’s Graduate School of Education.
Janis Fine, an associate professor of educational leadership at Loyola University, said the new collaborative, “will allow there to be a comprehensive and integrated pipeline” of principals for the district.
Nancy Hanks, a second year principal at Genevieve Melody Elementary School, where Monday’s announcement was made, had mixed feelings about the district’s new performance pay initiative.
“I don’t think most people who get into education, get involved because they want some sort of a bonus out of it,” she said. “Most incentive based programs are just about the results and not necessarily the supports people really need to reach some of those measures. Coupled together, I think it could be a great incentive.”
Two suggestions:
1) Cap ALL CPS salaries at $120,000. This would not affect a single classroom teacher.
2) Base a return to any present salary levels or future raises for principals on quantifiable data such as the retention of staff, number of sustained grievances and the resolution of disciplinary issues.