Prince Peter’s Performance Pay Survives Attempted Coup; CMS Board Seeks $50 Million Bump
With a divisive 5-4 vote the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education on Tuesday night approved a $1.17-billion budget plan that hopes to suck $352 million from county coffers, a $50 million increase from the school system’s current take.
And that was the easy vote. The battle royal came when a different five-member majority fended off an attempt to stall Superintendent Peter Gorman’s controversial, unproven and pricey performance-pay plan for teachers, last seen steaming down the tracks with a slew of new tests that critics contend take away valuable educational time from classrooms and big bucks from the budget.
Board member Kaye McGarry led the attempted coup, proposing an amendment to the budget motion that would have put the brakes on Gorman’s performance-pay project and redirected any savings to help retain teacher jobs.
Those savings, she said, could reach into the millions from the district’s Center for Human Capital Strategies initiative that’s helping launch the nascent performance-pay project and the ongoing Teacher Incentive Fund/Leadership for Educators’ Advanced Performance initiative, which is already being used to establish a performance-based compensation system focused on 20 low-performing schools.
“While I agree with the superintendent that pay-for-performance is a worthwhile end,” McGarry said, “I do not agree on the means that he is railroading through to obtain that.”
McGarry was particularly critical of the battery of new tests that students have already been subjected to, part of a trail run for the performance-pay project, which she called using “our kids as widgets and guinea pigs in order to get data.”
“Your budget has to set your priorities and your priorities should be teachers, number one,” McGarry said. “When you pour this much money into a plan that you don’t know if it’s going to work, in this economic climate, to me that’s not the way to go.”
Board member Richard McElrath agreed. He joined McGarry, Joyce Waddell and Tom Tate in the failed attempt to park the performance-pay juggernaut. McElrath said he had searched far and wide for any evidence that pay-for-performance plans work, and had come up empty.
“We’re spending a ton of money on something that we can’t really promise that we can deliver to anyone,” he said, “while we’re not addressing the problems we really have.”
Those problems, according to McElrath, are rooted in a student-assignment plan that economically segregates the school system.
Tate also said he could find no evidence that performance pay helps improve student achievement and graduation rates.
“My basic concern is that we’ve gotten on a road that we don’t know how to get off of and we don’t know whether it works,” he said. “That is the road to pay for performance.”
Board member Rhonda Lennon said the district should keep on trucking. She joined board chair Eric Davis and members Richard Morgan, Trent Merchant and Joe White in voting against the amendment to curb the performance-pay plan.
“When you take a road trip with your family, if you get to an intersection and you’re not sure which way to go, you might pull off the road and do a little more research but you don’t turn around and go home,” Lennon said.
The board, she said, was taking the appropriate steps to make sure performance pay was on the right path, before it’s fully implemented in three years.
“I don’t think we need to pull off the road to do that,” Lennon said. “I think you do that when you’re still moving forward.”
After McGarry’s performance-pay amendment was shot down, Lennon joined McGarry, McElrath and Waddell in voting against the proposed budget and its $50 million increase from the county.
The additional funding, proponents argue, would save 461 teacher jobs, 328 teacher assistant jobs, and prevent steep cuts to the district’s Bright Beginnings pre-kindergarten program.
But by making the $50 million ask, Lennon said, the school board was essentially punting the budget ball to commissioners.
“It’s up to us to make the tough decisions, and not pass the buck,” she said. “I don’t get to tell my employer how much I need each week. He tells me here’s my paycheck and I figure out how to make it work with my bills.”
White disagreed and said it was a “moral obligation” on his part to ask for what the school system thinks it needs – a sentiment echoed by Merchant.
“We’re doing our job here by putting out the request and being honest about what our needs are,” he said. “This is really step one, to get the ball rolling, in our process. With the additional request we’re getting back to a per-pupil funding level that will take us back to the 2006 level.”
Moving back to the future, though, will likely prove a bumpy ride. Several commissioners have already indicated it would be difficult to provide the additional $50 million.
“It is absurd that CMS is even considering such a proposal,” Commissioner Bill James wrote in an email. “I don’t know that CMS really thinks they need the extra $50 million. This is more about the school board trying to paint the County Commissioners as the bad guys.”
Commissioners will receive the county manager’s recommended budget, to include a funding level for CMS, next week.
A public hearing on the county budget is scheduled for May 17, followed on May 19 with CMS and Central Piedmont Community College making their formal budget request presentations to commissioners. The county board is slated to adopt a budget on June 7.
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