JUNEAU -- A new idea to improve schools on the cheap: Rewarding really good principals with one-time $5,000 bonuses.
That proposal from an Alaska Democrat is reminiscent of an earlier Republican proposal to provide cash bonuses to teachers and other staff in schools that showed high and improving achievement.
Bill sponsor Rep. Les Gara, D-Anchorage, said the bonuses would have an effect.
"We want to have excellent principals. Studies show that in increasing academic achievement, a principal can be responsible for up to 30 percent of academic achievement. Those are the established studies," he said.
Alaska used a similar program from 2007 to 2009, which paid up to $5,500 to principals, teachers and other staff of schools that were measured to have a combination of improvement and high achievement. The program paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in bonuses but was widely panned. Some teachers rejected or redirected the bonuses, with others saying they did their best work regardless of the bonuses.
It was not renewed after its three-year trial period, following wide variation in each year's school rankings, with the state's tiniest schools dominating the top and bottom of the rankings due to statistical variation.
Gara said his proposal shouldn't be compared to the former Alaska Public School Performance Incentive Program of several years ago.
"The school performance bonus was a disaster," Gara said. "It didn't measure teacher performance, it didn't give a bonus to the best teachers, it didn't give a bonus to transformational teachers."
Instead, he said, "It gave a bonus to all teachers in any school who met a certain criteria, whether they were a good teacher or a not-as-good teacher."
Gara's proposal would have districts reward the commitment of principals to "success in maximizing student potential and achievement."
It would be up to school districts to determine which principals deserved the $5,000 bonuses.
"A good school district will be able to figure that out," he said.
Gara said he was not claiming that the bonuses would either get principals to either do a better job or that the one-time bonuses would recruit better principals to Alaska.
He said the new bonus plan was much different than the failed old plan.
"It was a sound bite more than a policy," he said."We learned from that."
The bill, co-sponsored by Reps. Harriet Drummond and Chris Tuck, both Anchorage Democrats, is expected to be introduced Monday and has not yet been widely seen publicly or had a number assigned.
Department of Education Commissioner Mike Hanley said in legislative testimony Thursday that focusing on teachers is the key to improving school performance.
"If there is a silver bullet in education, it's high quality teachers," Hanley said.
Gara said that would cost more.
"I'd love to do this for teachers too," he said, but it was the best the state could do in the current fiscal climate. No cost estimate has yet been developed.
Contact Pat Forgey at pat(at)alaskadispatch.com.