School Improvement Brings Bonuses

Teacher Mary Ellen Hicks still finds it hard to believe that one day soon she’ll be holding a bonus check for $25,000, courtesy of California taxpayers.

But the windfall appears to be all but in the mail.

After months of legal wrangling and technical snafus, the state is handing over $100 million in big-money rewards for more than 12,000 teachers, principals and other employees at low-ranking schools that showed remarkable gains in Stanford 9 test scores last year.

“If we get that big, fat bonus, I’ll be thrilled,” said Hicks, a special-education teacher at Carl E. Gilbert Elementary School in Buena Park. She plans to apply the money directly to her 20-year-old daughter’s “big, fat tuition bill” at a dramatic academy in Manhattan.

Still, like many other teachers, she will accept the money with mixed emotions. Basing a bonus on one test makes her uneasy.

“I think you have to be really careful,” she said.

Hicks is among more than 12,000 teachers, principals, librarians and others at 304 schools statewide who expect to receive checks in the coming weeks. The biggest bonuses--$25,000--are earmarked for 1,000 staff members at schools that showed the greatest improvement. An additional 3,750 employees will be receiving $10,000 each, with 7,500 getting $5,000 apiece.

Southern California schools are due to receive $65.8 million, while Northern California schools will collect $34.2 million.

Twenty Los Angeles Unified School District campuses will be splitting $6.1 million.

Several intended recipients were jubilant Tuesday. Their joy at imminent aid for tuition, a house down payment or a car purchase, however, was tempered by concerns. Some said the money would be better spent on school maintenance and educational programs.

The $100-million reward pot is a key feature of Gov. Gray Davis’ testing and accountability program. The program has raised outcry because it represents the highest monetary stakes ever attached to a single test.

Originally scheduled to be sent out in June, the payments were held up. In March, some Sacramento teachers filed suit, saying the program discriminated against schools that showed huge gains over a single year rather than over two. The state won the case, though the teachers have appealed.

Separately, a scoring error by the publisher of the Stanford 9 inflated some schools’ results, causing the state to send out reward money to six Central Valley schools that didn’t qualify. State education officials had to recalculate the list of schools eligible for the big-money rewards.

Ron Dietel, spokesman for the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA, questioned whether some schools received awards they did not deserve and some deserving schools were slighted.

“It’s a great idea to be able to reward teachers for improving students’ achievement,” Dietel said. “But the question is to what extent will it be perceived as being a fair reward when so few teachers will benefit from it, and when the teachers themselves don’t really know what they must do instructionally” to receive awards.

For teachers, principals and other staff members to qualify, a school had to be ranked in the state’s bottom half of performers and show progress in test scores in 1999 and 2000. For 2000, the school had to show an improvement of at least double its annual growth target.

To qualify, employees must have certification from the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing. They include teachers, principals, vice principals, school counselors, nurses, librarians and computer technology specialists.

For staff members at Vanguard Learning Center in Compton, the $850,000 in rewards will be particularly sweet. The school is in the Compton Unified School District, which during the time Vanguard racked up its gains was operating under state supervision because of the district’s poor financial and academic performance.

Among middle schools in Los Angeles County, Vanguard made the most improvement, and it was third among middle schools statewide, Principal Deloris Davis Holmes said.

Some staff members, Holmes said, have indicated they’ll be sharing money with other employees. One counselor has said she’s taking the school secretary on a cruise and some students to San Diego on the train. Holmes, meanwhile, has her eye on a black PT Cruiser.

Another $100-million pot for the big-money rewards is included in this year’s budget, earmarked for certificated staff members whose schools showed large gains in 2001.

The law creating the awards program leaves the final decision on how much money each staff member receives to each school’s council of staff, parents and union representatives. That could be divisive, said Bev Cook, a vice president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, the union representing L.A. Unified’s teachers. Veteran teachers could receive more money, and teachers whose students performed particularly well on the test could claim they deserve a larger share.

The union will stay out of those decisions, Cook said, and state officials said they do not anticipate much conflict.

The lists of the 304 elementary, middle and high schools eligible for the 2000 awards are available on the Web at https://www.ose.ca.gov.

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Times staff writer Daniel Yi contributed to this story.