etee's Blog

The editorial in today's Houston Chronicle titled Top heavy: Hefty bonuses for HISD superintendent, administrators and principals provide jarring contrast with teacher wages raised some questions about the bonus plan at HISD. I found the following highly enlightening:

All HISD principals who had been employed a year also received bonuses, ranging from under $1,000 to nearly $9,000. It seems unlikely that in a district with more than 250 eligible principals, all would qualify as superior performers.

Anyone familiar with HISD knows there are bad principals as well as teachers in the system. A rating system that awards bonuses to everybody is not effectively rewarding the best and the brightest. The HISD formula is a shaky pyramid scheme in which escalating bonuses up the ladder are leveraged on the performances of the lowest paid and rewarded staffers.

Amen.

As a former student and (indirect) taxpayer of HISD, this whole bonus thing just seems slightly odd - sort of like it has the odor of mildly overripe fish.

First, we have a public announcement of bonuses for teachers, which stirred up hard feelings in the breakrooms across the district. Then, we find that, due to a computer glitch, some of the teachers are being "asked" to return a part of their bonus. (Seriously, folks, had the pinheads who designed and accepted that software ever heard of things like "QA testing" and "use cases"?) Next, we hear that 83% of the principals were awarded bonuses. Then, to top things off, "Honest Abe" winds up with the Mother of All Bonuses: an amount greater than the annual salary of pretty much all of the teachers who work for him.

While this may not be a pyramid scheme in the strictest sense of the term, the fact is that the $$$$MONEY$$$$$ is moving its way up to the top. And, given that this has produced howls of rage and gnashing of teeth when it gets out of hand in the private sector, it ought to be causing a bunch of raised eyebrows when it is spotted in the public sector.

Maybe the Spirit of Enron is not dead, after all: maybe it continues to live on, in the offices on West 18th.

(cross-posted on etee too)