Signing Bonuses, Superstars, & Mike Klonsky

There's a fun post from Mike Klonksy's blog about the news from earlier this week that CPS put in a handful of "superstar" principals as part of its efforts to turn around certain schools (Move over George Steinbrenner).  I don't know the schools or the principals individually, but Klonsky seems to and has some questions about who got picked and, ultimately, whether signing bonuses work -- in sports or education.

My question, for what it's worth, is what the Board did before the bonuses to persuade a principal to change schools and head into a tough one?  Did they only ask folks who were in need of a job, or do they have some power over principals who are in place?  Because, as with most things we're reading about these days, most of this stuff has been tried before.  Thoughts, reactions?

Comments

I'm not a big fan of small schools, but Klonsky's remarks are right-on target regarding signing bonuses and the message they send to the teachers and community. This is all part of "market-driven" approach to school improvement. It's just the part that says money motivates people...even though research in education proves that wrong. If it's true in "industry" then it's true everywhere according to U of C strategists and CPS.

As to 11:23's comments, I think its much too early to say that bonuses don't work in education. It seems obvious that no one has found the exact right approach, but I think the right performance based incentives that are well thought out and not just based arbitrarily on test scores could work very well.

In general, I think a lot more work needs to go into measuring the success of teachers and principals. As a former CPS teacher who saw my principal stick his head in my door once a year for 30 seconds, but still somehow wrote my formal evaluation, I can only imagine what the current standard for evaluation is across the district.

If the district develops a thoughtful approach to performance evaluation, I think the next logical step would be bonuses of some sort based on good performance. In that case, I also think it would make sense to give some of those same teachers or administrators signing bonuses to work in the schools that needed them most.

[George Schmidt]

Signing bonuses are a bad idea whether promoted by Rev. Sen. Meeks or Arne Duncanbrenner.

In running high schools, the devil is in the details. The key differentiation between Chicago's general high schools (which supposedly will benefit from this kind of "help") and the selective enrollment high schools (magnets and charters are both in this category) is simple.

Today (September 8), the general high schools are completing their first week or registration and reorganization. At places like Gage Park, the teachers and staff are still scrounging desks and books, and will continue to do so for weeks.

Meanwhile, all of the students in the selective schools (e.g., Lane Tech) are completing their first week of instructioin.

Being the parent of a 12th grader at one of the selective enrollment schools (and a former general high school teacher with 28 years of mostly inner city experience before I was fired and blacklisted by Mayor Daley's Board of Education six years ago), I can assure anyone who cares that this is the key.

Chicago's general high schools will finally reorganize some time after the 20th day.

By then, the students in the selective schools will have completed their fourth week of uninterrupted instruction.

If all goes according to script, the hypocrisy and nastiness will begin right after Christmas. Sometime next winter, Arne Duncan will discover that the schools his policies have sabotaged are "failing" and there will be a media blitz with all the terrible news.

Security problems are terrible!

Test scores are "underperforming".

Chicago's public educaton version of "Shock and Awe" is once again necessary, and Chicago has just the CEO to lead the attack, and just the press corps to to their embedded duty. (Chicago also has the Provisional Privatization Authority -- under our own Paul Bremer's in the Office of New Schools Development and the luxuriously funded charter school outfits -- to provide the market based alternatives, once the natives have been subdued.)

With the script already written, it's easy to read the future. Duncan will again be hailed for his "courage" when he scapefoats another handful of general schools (elementary and high schools). After he subjects them to the witch trials under highly paid patronage "hearing officers," and continues the ugly process of churning public schools into private charters and miscellaneous novelty sites under "Renaissance 2010," the media will line up to report breathlessly the miracles that have been wrought. In the past five months, the Sun-Times has devoted more pages praising charter schools that either have no record (Urban Prep) or charters that failed in their initial bullshit claims (U of C Donohue) than to the hundreds of decent public schools (including the one one of their reporters taught at long enough to get a book out of the experience) that just slog along all year. Someone could get a PhD in communications just examining how CPS propaganda becomes "news" under the current sets of beliefs and prejudices.

But we need to examine the insult to hundreds of teachers and principals being done this week under the "signing bonus" stupidity, so let's drift back to that for a moment.

This "signing bonus" nonsense is just another variation on the notion that inner city schools need a guy on a white horse to save them. Once upon a time these were "external partners." Lately they've been hypercaffeinated charter school marketers with too much Power Point and too little actual inner city experience. There is a continuity here.

Some of these things are pretty exotic. One of the reported bonus babies is Keith Foley, who caused the controversies last year at Lane Tech with his hard-charging dogmatic Christianity. That flap, in a school that has one of the most diverse populations in Chicago, was swept under the rug after a bit of noise, but the perpetrator obviouslyy brought himself to someone's attention. Now the guy is supposed to be savior of Marshall High School.

Marshall High School faces every challenge you can from the middle of the remaining ungentrified section of the West Side. Marshall was "underperforming" under Steve Newton, so CPS dumped Newton and installed ex-jock Don Pittman (now Chief of High Schools, but don't ask him to post something he wrote himself here without some heavy editing). Despite all of the Danny Davis clout that kept Marshall off the various hit lists for the past ten years, "underperformance" continued at Marshall. Steve Newton with his bullhorn couldn't turn around Marshall. Don Pittman with his bullshit couldn't turn around Marshall.

So in 2006, under Arne Duncan and under pressure from Rev. Sen. Meeks, Marshhall's (black) principal is dumped and the new (white) principal is eligible for a bonus?

We used to be more forthright about looking at these things and calling them out for what they are.

One of the most interesting things about this salvation process -- and it's been so from the beginning of "external partners" a decade ago -- is that these various saviors all (a) come in from the outside, and (b) usually have little or no inner city experience. Some make big claims, but there is no way to check out a record. Even Barbara Sizemore, who actually had some inner city experience (although much less success than the hype that helped sell her SAS program) faced challenges she couldn't meet when she was hired in Chicago. Her attacks on inner city teachers and principals began decades ago in Chicago and resumed when Paul Vallas brought her in as an external partner for what amounted to a huge signing bonus in 1997 to reorganize Englewood High School. SAS purges the school, humiliated the staff (and scapegoated the students, too) and then left Englewood precisely as it had been, albeit with a younger and less veteran staff. All the hype (including page one stories in the Chicago Tribune) couldn't solve the complext problems challenging Englewood H.S., and all the dollars poured into SAS didn't change much at Englewood (or Tilden or any of the other schools that got this treatment).

So this stuff is just more of the same old stuff. Witch hunts and scapegoating.

At the least, signing bonuses, for both principals and teachers, will demoralize those veterans who have been slogging away at regular salaries. The idea that someone from Lane Tech is ready to be principal of Marshall is about as rational as the idea that Marshall can be improved by aliens who just talked to Elvis out in space. The teachers and principals who worked their careers in the boutique and elite schools have no clue as to what reality is like in the general high schools or the neighborhood, non-selective, elementary schools.

Cluelessness is no bar to executive status in CPS right now (Arne Duncan and the entire staff of the New Schools Development are among the many $100,000 plus examples). Someone should keep a journal, publicly, of the saviors' days and works in these places. We missed our change back when SAS and the first generation of saviors were dispatched in 1997, but given the eternal reincarnation of these bad ideas, it's never to late to begin.

It's nearly dawn. Long day ahead. As the character said in "Moby Dick" (which I taught to students -- who still remember and enjoy the memory -- in Chicago's general high schools, back before I was fired and blacklisted for heresies such as these), "Good day shipmates."

George N. Schmidt

[Rod Estvan]

As an advocate for students with disabilities I am not going to take a position on signing bonuses. But I will say that bonuses are being paid for special education teachers by districts in our state. When as a Corey H. Monitor we raised the issue of CPS being non-competitive in the special education teacher labor market we were told that signing bonuses were a non-starter for teachers.

Now we see that the CPS believes it works for principals. I personally find this distrubing and a double standard. There is no doubt that the bonuses in and of themselves will not keep teachers working in the CPS. Ultimately the factors are going to be pay, working conditions, and at least some perspective that a teachers efforts are resulting in positive gains for students.

Right now in very many CPS schools teachers are not realizing any of these conditions. Moreover, why would a young certified special education teacher want to work for the CPS when it has just laid off over 900 special eduction staff and other districts are paying bonuses?

No doubt there are some idealistic young special education teachers out there, and the parents of students with disabilities are thankful for them. But the reality is that the CPS is being turned into a training ground for special teachers who gain classroom management skills and then leave. Can we blame them?

Rod Estvan
Access Living of Metro Chicago

3:08 et al above who think signing bonuses and pay for performance work in education. Do an ERIC search on the topic. Doesn't work...been tried.

[tom]

George I enjoyed reading your very informative comments. allow me to put a face on Marshall and Lane the differences. Marshall receives from the feeders schools at the following levels; 8%(23) at/above standards, 28%(76) 1 year below standards, and 63%(172) 2 years below standards. Lane receives from the feeder schools; 93%(872) at/above standards, 7%(64) 1 year below, and 1%(5) 2 years below. Duncan is following the business of the Commercial Club, choice, competition and incentives. Hauser and Havinghurst did reports on segregation in Chicago schools around 1964. Havinghurst stated: Chicago's chief problem is this: how to keep and attract middle-income people to the central city and how to maintain a substantial white majority in the central city." Gentrification is accomplishing that and African Americans are being dispersed in many directions, never to return to the so called mixed income developments. Ren 1010 needed to acquire schools in the path of gentrification, although Duncan and Scott denied it. Finally, Duncan is only demoralizing a whole school system. teachers and some administrators.

7:56 I did an ERIC search and found a mixed bag of results. As with most other education policy, districts choose the easiest way to implement an idea, are dissapointed when the results don't come out the way they thought they would and move on to the next band aid solution. If you want to attract the best and the brightest people to teach in our schools you're going to have to come up with something better than substandard pay that only rewards seniority, poor work conditions and little power to affect systemic change.

Klonsky's point wasn't that incentives shouldn't be offered to needed teachers to attract them to Chicago's inner-city schools. That's a lot different from the bonus-baby "superstar" principal strategy of Duncan's. I also don't agree with George who equates this strategy with one of struggling schools getting funding to hire university partners as outside support. Big difference.

1:17 there is lots of research out there which shows that good working conditions (including recognition for a job well done) are key motivators for educators. Money has short-term gains only in terms of motivation. Dismissing educational research because it measures "band-aids" clearly identifies you as someone from the outside who thinks they know it all. Another policy wonk!

[anniesullivan]

Rod,
Keep writing-you are so right. We lost a teacher last year with a K-8 certificate with endorsements in science, social studies and language arts, a special education certificate and a Type 75 solely because of principal abuse. Orland Park snatched her up and gave her credit for 13 years of experience including two from the Catholic school system. She waxes poetic about the professionalism of her administrators. She does not have to worry about overcrowded special education classrooms or children without one on one aides.
She never would have left CPS except for the antics of an insecure administrator who thankfully has retired.

We have a new administrator who is young but seems sincere about doing a good job. Yesterday, he gave up his air-conditioning motor to a classroom of 30 and a very grateful teacher who had asked in writing for her AC unit to be repaired for two years. The old principal would shake his head and scurry back into his air-conditioned office and nothing was done. This room in a new annex has been without air conditioning for at least 4 years.

I do not think the above mentioned teacher would have left our school under the administration of the new principal.

Does CPS do exit surveys when teachers leave the system?
Exactly, how many special education classrooms are being staffed by non-certified teachers?

Please let it occur to all readers that CPS can drive principals crazy too. You are fired if you do not obey and your LSC fires you if you don't obey them. Or PURE comes after you, even when your LSC is happy with your performance. Crazy system.

Yes, CPS is a screwy system-yesterday I had to spend a major portion of my day giving my special education students the Learning First Test. What a waste of time for them. They are instructed at a 2nd and 3rd grade level but had to take a 5th grade test. I pump them up and a test that they can not read deflates them. I do not understand why a self-contained classroom would not be given an instructional level test.

[methusaleh]

There are 600 principals. You need to speak up and stop making excuses. There is an administrator shortage-use it to your advantage. Get rid of your principals' association-they have been silent for too long. It is sad when principals ask union reps to file grievances against CPS just to get the correct amount of teachers or aides for a school.

Principals have been asking union reps to file grievances for years--years. There is no principal's union. Not allowed. And if we did not have CPAA, we would now have riots in the schools right now if they did not use subtle pressure on the new discipline code. (The lawyer who sponsored this is now consultation only--thank heavens.) As for 600 hundred principals--many are coming from different programs and are in charter schools and Ren 10 vs the traditional route. It will remain to be seen as to how many will join a professional organization like CPAA. CPS and the LSCs just may motivate them to join.