Several New York City high school principals are receiving performance bonuses under the terms of an old program even though their schools fared poorly under the district's new grading system. The old program uses the same tests as the new one but apparently sets lower achievement benchmarks.
The UFT is upset about this:
"It's a cockeyed situation," said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. "One set of metrics can generate a bonus and yet a separate set of metrics for the same exact school can generate an F. It just shows that using one set of data as the be-all and end-all just doesn't make [sense]."
It's cockeyed, for sure, but the real problem isn't that they're using one set of data. The problem is that the district keeps casting its accountability systems in concrete rather than soft, malleable Play-Doh. High-performing organizations are flexible enough to adapt to changing external circumstances and agile enough to carry out internal adjustments on the fly.
Public school districts will never do either of these things truly well since they're largely chained to the inertia of the political process, but some government agencies have proved that they can slim down and smarten up when finally impelled to do so by the competition. Maybe someday this will happen in the schools sector.
