Incentivizing Principals: Lessons From One District’s Experiences With Principal Pay for Performance

• In Event: Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Designing and Implementing Educator Performance Pay Programs: Lessons From the Field

Abstract

This paper examines the implementation of new principal compensation policies in one moderately sized school district. The program included monetary rewards for student outcomes and principal practices, along with professional development and other supports to help principals improve their performance. The paper identifies key findings and lessons learned based on four years of evaluation of this program.
Research suggests that principals play an important role in promoting student learning in their schools through their work as managers and instructional leaders (Grissom & Loeb, 2009, Leithwood et al., 2004). The primary means through which principals influence learning is their work with teachers, including efforts to shape teacher practices, staffing, and school culture (Supovitz et al., 2010; Murphy, Elliott, Goldring, & Porter, 2007). These aspects of principals’ practices are the focus of the program that this paper examines. Principals are evaluated according to a standards-based rubric that emphasizes principals’ work with teachers, and on a school-level measure of student achievement.

The evaluation includes a qualitative component in which several data sources were examined to understand how the program has been implemented and what challenges and enablers have influenced implementation. These data sources included district-developed written materials, principal and school staff surveys, and interviews with central office staff, teachers, coaches, and principals. In addition, the evaluation team obtained student achievement and demographic data from the district, along with principals’ scores on the measures of practices and student achievement. Analyses examined distributions of principal scores on the measures and relationships between these scores and other characteristics of principals and schools. Because the program was adopted throughout the entire district, there is no comparison group that would facilitate an analysis of the effects of the program on student outcomes. However, we examine trends in performance across various measures and student groups to assess whether these trends are consistent with the hypothesis that the program influenced student outcomes in the ways its developers intended.
Several findings emerged from these analyses. For the most part, principals supported the new program but have identified a number of barriers including lack of sufficient time to engage in instructional leadership and skepticism about the validity of the achievement measures. Principals reported changing their practices in response to the rubric-based evaluation of practices, and many stated that this part of the evaluation provided valuable professional development. By contrast, a majority of principals report that the achievement bonus did not influence practices. Analyses of scores on the performance measures shows that an increase in performance on the measure of practices is associated with large and statistically significant increase in achievement growth in later years, and that scores on low-stakes achievement measures have increased but not as quickly as scores on the measures tied to performance bonuses. Although this study cannot support strong causal conclusions about the effects of the program, it does provide some guidance to help district staff anticipate and address likely threats to effective implementation.

Author

• Laura S. Hamilton, RAND Corporation