The Best Laid Plans of Principal Performance Pay

• In Event: Roundtable Session 116
  In Roundtable Session: Principal Accountability: Measuring Performance for Merit Pay and Ongoing Improvement

Abstract

In the last decade, numerous states (Florida, Idaho, Iowa, and Texas), districts (e.g. Denver, NYC) and individual schools have implemented pay for performance incentive plans as mechanisms to motivate and reward educators. Even with mixed findings on their efficacy, performance incentives have become a prominent feature in education policy. Most incentive policies reward both teachers and principals, however current research on incentives has focused nearly exclusively on teachers.
The goal of this research is to provide a descriptive overview of 33 principal incentive plans designed by practitioners and policy makers across the country over the last decade. Guided by the literature that outlines optimal design components, we compare the plans to prevailing theory. We conclude with recommendations for the design and research of performance incentive plans that target school principals.
Equitable and effective incentive programs are notoriously difficult to design; however research provides guidance for best practices. Current theories espoused in the literature are primarily focused on the design of performance incentive plans for teachers. From this literature on the design considerations of school pay for performance systems, three criteria emerge as essential to the structure of principal incentive plans: measures of performance, converting measures into incentives, and the incentive bonus itself.
The designs of principal pay for performance systems frequently exhibit common components, including raw student achievement, student achievement gain, participation in professional development, and performance reviews. To an extent this is an artifice of the TIF guidelines, which stipulate that all proposals must (a) give significant weight to student growth and (b) include observation-based assessments of teacher and principal performance at multiple points in the year. The inclusion of other common elements, namely professional development or coaching, may reveal that policy makers share a common understanding that these measures are central to school’s success. Alternatively, the prevalence of similar measures could also indicate that policy makers feel as though there were few choices available to determine the principal’s contribution to school performance. Given the paucity of measures used and the lack of innovation across the entire sample, a lack of perceived choices may be the more tractable hypothesis.
The measures selected to evaluate principal behaviors are often modified from teacher evaluations rather than targeting aspects unique to school leadership. Elements that may be well suited to evaluating school leadership but are not included in the typical list of teacher measures may include tracking the improvement in teacher value-added scores, determining improvement in measures of school climate, instructional leadership, or increased efficiency in the use of limited school finances. Although most plans include multiple measures for both teacher and principal evaluation, the principal plans frequently include fewer and less sophisticated measures than do the teacher plans.
This paper concludes with a discussion of how to best structure an incentive program for school leadership by highlighting some of the best practices from across the proposals reviewed. The paper can and findings can inform the criteria of proposal requests from agencies and organizations involved with school leadership incentive programs.

Authors

• Peter Trabert Goff, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Ellen B. Goldring, Vanderbilt University