Lynn Walsh

Houston school system leaders have said they want to bring outside perspectives to a committee that advises the district on the $1.6 billion annual budget.

They also said they wanted to revamp a second committee that directs a troubled construction program funded with $800 million in bond money to ensure the committee is transparent and free of conflicts of interest.

But a look at who’s on those committees doesn’t turn up many new faces.

The budget advisory committee is packed with school system staffers, not outsiders — nearly four members of out of every five are HISD employees. Meanwhile, the bulk of the members of the committee overseeing the bond program are the same people who were on the committee before the revamp — though they’ve now been certified as conflict-free.

And for the three vacant posts on the bond committee, a third of the applications Texas Watchdog reviewed came from people who already have a direct tie to the school system, such as being a district employee or former employee, serving on another HISD committee or listing an HISD official as a reference.

“All public schools are not treated equally in Houston,” said Richard Spence, a health care consultant who has applied for one of the three vacant seats. He says he doesn’t have any connections to the school system beyond being a Lee High School alumnus. “It shouldn’t matter whether you have political clout or not. These should all be very transparent decisions.”

HISD says it is allowing anyone to apply to be on the bond committee, and all applications will be reviewed for possible conflicts of interest. The district also said the two committees and their makeup are not related because they serve different purposes.

“There’s a big difference between an oversight committee’s mission and the mission of an advisory committee,” HISD spokesman Jason Spencer said in an e-mail. “It’s important to have employees (principals, teachers, etc.) on the budget committee because they have valuable insight into how money is spent at the campus level.”

Overseeing the construction projects is the Bond Oversight Committee, so named because the construction work is funded through $800 million in bonds.

School officials have been trying to revamp the committee after a 2010 report said the construction program suffered from communication problems, lacked planning and was missing budget reports.

Also last year, it was revealed that some of the proposed appointees to the committee had potential conflicts of interest, a controversy that came to light in part when the Houston Chronicle reported that school system trustee Diana Dávila had tried to get her husband named to the committee. Dávila wound up stepping down from the school board soon after.

Since then, HISD Chief Operating Officer Leo Bobadilla has worked to rid the committee of conflicts, requiring all the existing committee members to reapply for their positions. (Two chose not to reapply.) They’re also being required to verify to the district that they have read the committee rules, which include new language forbidding conflicts of interest, and to affirm that they are conflict-free, Spencer said.

At the same time, the school board also restructured the makeup of the committee to make it less insidery in the future.

For years, the committee had guaranteed seats for representatives of specific business groups including the Houston Citizens Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Houston Partnership. But the school district — partly in a move to bring in people without potential conflicts — did away with the guaranteed seats this school year, except for the provision that at least one member must have experience in engineering or building design.

However, even though the guaranteed seats are no more, most of the people who were in those guaranteed seats have reapplied for their posts. They include the man who has chaired the committee since 1998, retired Halliburton executive Bernard Pieper, who was originally appointed to the committee by the Associated General Contractors; Carroll Robinson, appointed by the Citizens Chamber; and Chris Hudson, the appointee of the American Institute of Architects.

So far, 22 applications for the three available seats on the Bond Oversight Committee have been received by HISD, of which 18 were reviewed by Texas Watchdog. (Four other people have applied since Texas Watchdog reviewed those records.) The 18 applicants included:
Four current HISD employees, including three teachers and an information technology staffer, as well as a retired HISD maintainence supervisor;
A green energy consultant who listed service in the PTO at T.H. Rogers Middle School, and a general contractor who said he had served in the Booker T. Washington High alumni association;
A lawyer who listed the principal of Lovett Elementary School among his references;
Robert L. Ford, a prominent scientist at Texas Southern University who already serves on the improvement committee for HISD’s Thompson Elementary School;
A Dallas-area man who is a member of the school board in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school system, and who offered to lend HISD his expertise;
An attorney specializing in construction litigation; a paralegal; a business manager for the local ironworkers’ union; an executive with an information technology company; a retired federal worker; and an executive with a Baytown-based construction firm.
Technology worker Nicolas Alvarado was among the current HISD employees who applied.

Alvarado told Texas Watchdog he thinks he “could bring something of a reality check to the committee and ask hard questions.” He recalled working at Debakey High School when it underwent renovations a couple of years ago: “The decisions they made seemed really flawed at the time, and the oversight of the contractor seemed insufficient. It took too long, it cost more money to get things started, and I was like, ‘Who is watching these bozos?’”

Unfortunately for him, the new committee rules put in place last year specifically ban current HISD employees from serving on the committee, along with district vendors, contractors and consultants. (Spencer reaffirmed that Alvarado would not be allowed to serve because of the rules.)

References listed by the applicants include current and former HISD employees and administrators, HISD trustee Paula Harris, former HISD Superintendent Abe Saavedra, one of Gov. Rick Perry’s staffers, Houston City Councilwoman Wanda Adams and Harris County Justice of the Peace Zinetta Burney.

But not all the applicants listed an HISD connection.

“I have watched HISD go through ebbs and flows of common sense when it comes to using finances that they are provided,” said Spence, the former director of strategic planning for the University of Texas in Houston, who listed Perry staffer Terry Zrubek as a reference but no one in HISD. “The HISD brand is broken, and I want to see it improve.”

Despite the three vacancies, the committee is continuing to meet as scheduled. HISD does not have a date for when the positions will be filled, and there’s no cutoff date for applications, but the district has started meeting with some applicants, Spencer said.

Meanwhile, the Budget Advisory Committee is meeting twice monthly to provide “input and feedback” on financial matters at a time that funding cuts from the state could be as much as $348 million per year.

When Grier created the committee this school year, he told the press he wanted “outside perspectives” on it, saying he wanted to include business leaders and maybe even a student.

More than 75% of the 32 committee members are HISD employees, including 10 principals and two teachers. Only 7 of the 32 are HISD parents or members of the public at large — and of those seven, six already serve on another HISD committee, while the seventh is head of the group Parents for Public Schools of Houston.

Seven of 32 is “at least a somewhat significant representation” of the general public, Spencer said.

Harris, HISD’s newly named school board president, said she wasn’t bothered by the ratio. “If it’s 100 percent or 80 percent representation, it doesn’t matter,” she said, adding that the community meetings the district has held around the city on budget issues have been more important.

There’s also no student on the committee after all. Spencer said Grier’s chief of staff, Michele Pola, who is on the budget advisory committee, told him that “the meeting schedule didn’t seem conducive to a student’s schedule.” The committee has sometimes met on weekday mornings, when classes are in session. Instead, “there has been some thought given to a student focus group to give input on budget decisions.”

The committee is meeting twice a month now, according to HISD, and some issues discussed include ways the district can spend professional development money wisely, the role the district plays in engaging parents and HISD employee pay, according to minutes from the meetings (which can be found here).

But the advisory committee’s role is merely to make recommendations. It has no legal authority to make cuts or changes to the budget — only the elected trustees can do that.

HISD administrators on the advisory committee include Pola, chief human resources officer Ann Best, chief communications officer Aggie Alvez and chief financial officer Melinda Garrett. All of the administrators, 13 in total, also serve on a smaller, more elite panel called the Superintendent’s Budget Committee that is comprised entirely of HISD staff. (A list of members of the Budget Advisory Committee is here.)

Pay-for-performance teacher bonus programs in the New York City schools did not increase student achievement and may have decreased it at larger schools, Harvard economist and Houston school system Apollo 20 advisor Roland Fryer says.

The Houston Independent School District spent more than $42 million this year on performance bonuses, which school leaders say is a key part of having an effective teacher in every classroom.

Fryer serves as the leader of the HISD partnership with Harvard University’s Education Innovation Laboratory, known as EdLabs, which has been working closely and making recommendations for HISD’s school turnaround program, Apollo 20.

“I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior,” Fryer says in a paper published online this month. “If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”

The report is described on its title page as a “working paper,” a term often used to describe the preliminary version of a study that has not yet been formally published.

HISD says its bonuses are not meant to make teachers work harder. The goal, spokesman Jason Spencer said, “is to award and retain top teachers who are already in the district and to attract more great teachers into HISD.”

In an e-mail to Texas Watchdog, Spencer said the district has “strong data” that shows ASPIRE is working in HISD:

The percentage of students scoring at the highest level, “commended,” on the state achievement test known as TAKS “has increased significantly” in HISD.
More people are applying for vacant HISD teaching jobs than they were five years ago. The district received 69 applications for every position in 2006 and 169 in 2009.
HISD has increased its teacher retention rate by three percent.
In the new study, Fryer focuses on the $75 million in bonuses given out to more than 20,000 New York City teachers between 2007 and 2010.

The New York study offered to give bonuses of $3,000 per teacher to every school that met its target report card scores and bonuses of $1,500 per teacher to every school that met more than 75% of its target scores. (On average, Fryer wrote, that equated to a bonus of about $180,000 to schools that aced the report cards and $90,000 to the other group.)

The schools themselves — chosen from some of New York’s lowest performers — were then allowed to decide how to spend or dole out their bonus money. Many chose to hand out bonuses of about $3,000 to most of their teachers, the study found.

“Providing incentives to teachers based on (a) school’s performance on metrics involving student achievement, improvement, and the learning environment did not increase student achievement in any statistically meaningful way,” Fryer says in the report. “If anything, student achievement declined.”

Incentive programs have, however, worked in school systems in other nations, Fryer wrote. As for why they didn’t work in New York, his theories included the possibility that the bonuses — about $3,000 per teacher — were too small to matter.

Or, he said, it could be that the individuals schools’ habit of doling the bonuses out equally to most of their teachers, instead of giving the most money to the highest performers, lessened the incentive.

(By comparison, the HISD teacher who won this year’s largest bonus, a teacher at Lyons Elementary, received $11,000, while the average award to HISD teachers was more than $3,000, the Chronicle reported.)

Also, Fryer said the criteria on which the bonuses were based — the report cards — were similar to the criteria by which the schools were already being judged for benchmarks such as “adequate yearly progress.”

Several states including Colorado, Florida, Michigan and Texas have implemented statewide student-achievement incentive programs for districts and schools.

Sixteen thousand five hundred HISD employees received bonuses this year — that’s 92% of the district’s bonus-eligible employees. The average teacher received $3,614,and the bonuses went to 99% percent of HISD teachers instructing students in core subjects like math, science and reading.

Over the next five years, HISD is slated to receive $31.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education to support the district’s initiative to have an effective teacher in every classroom. Sixteen million dollars of that is expected to go the ASPIRE bonus program, HISD says.

The grant is part of the Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund, through which more than 60 educational organizations in 27 states are set to receive $1.2 billion over the next five years.

HISD says Apollo 20 is “based on key tenets developed by Dr. Fryer and EdLabs,” which include having effective principals and teachers, tutoring and longer school days. Grier has estimated that the partnership with EdLabs will cost HISD about $150,000, but both Grier and Fryer have said that Fryer is not charging for his consulting services.

Earlier this year, Grier told the Houston Chronicle that the bonus program may be in need of some changes:

“We’ve got to take a hard look at that program, and we’ve got to be willing to change it,” Grier said. “When you have 92 percent of your employees receiving a bonus, you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Is it really a bonus program, or is it a program where you’re spreading out $42 million?’”
HISD trustees last week approved cutting funding next year for the ASPIRE program by more than $4 million. The cut will eliminate the attendance bonus and restrict the campus-based incentives to schools that receive the top two state rankings of “exemplary” or “recognized.”

The head of the Houston school system warned district employees of more layoffs and funding cuts minutes after district trustees approved budget cuts Thursday.

Next school year, Houston Independent School District schools will receive $275 less per student from the district. The reduction, approved by HISD trustees during its March board meeting, brings the district more than $58 million closer to closing a projected $171 million budget gap, HISD says.

“In the coming weeks, HISD principals will be deciding how their campuses will make do with less,” HISD Superintendent Terry Grier said in a letter to district staff. “They will be scrutinizing extracurricular programs, supply and equipment needs, and staffing levels. By April 18, they must notify teachers whose jobs can no longer be funded.”

The anticipated layoffs at individual schools are possible even after the cuts approved by trustees Thursday. HISD will spend $2.4 million less funding small schools and another $4.6 million less in unique school funding.

“These are sad times for every member of Team HISD,” Grier said in the letter. More than 700 HISD employees gave early notice of their plans for retirement after this school year, Grier said — more than 500 of them teachers.

HISD offered these employees incentives ranging from $500 to $2,500 if they notified the district of their plans to retire before March 1. The cash incentives increased for employees the longer they had been with the district.

Trustees also approved a timeline and process around the possible closure or consolidation of four HISD elementary schools: Love, Grimes, McDade and Rhoads. Closing all four would save the district close to $1.7 million, HISD said.

The district has proposed more ways of cutting the anticipated budget gap, some of which include a more uniform transportation schedule for all HISD campuses and cuts to police staffing at some schools.

Ending contracts with “low-performing” teachers in Houston schools has cost taxpayers $3.7 million, according to a recent investigation from Fox 26 News.

The Houston Independent School District ended its year-long contracts of 47 teachers last summer, leading to cash payouts for the former employees ranging from $45,000 to $73,000, according to the story.

HISD’s chief human resource officer, Ann Best, told Fox 26 the teachers were let go because they were not high-performing:

“‘We looked at past track records of success so I can assure that these were teachers that were low-performing,’ Best reasoned.”

Best also told Fox 26 that the teachers were let go to help implement the district’s Apollo 20 turnaround program for low-performing schools in the district.

Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, told Fox 26 she doesn’t believe that:

“’Ann Best is lying on that!’ Fallon countered. ‘Quite simply these folks did not have bad evaluations; these folks were in schools that weren’t functioning well.’”

At an HISD trustee meeting Thursday, the district announced there were 89 displaced teachers with continuing contracts next year, and the cost to keep the teachers on the payroll next year is $5.7 million.

HISD Superintendent Terry Grier said the district can’t afford to spend $5.7 million on non-budgeted teaching positions next year.

HISD trustee Harvin Moore described the situation as “a potential rubber room in Houston,” referring to suspended teachers in New York City who continued to be paid despite not having teaching assignments and spending months doing nothing.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The headline on this story has been changed. The earlier headline may have given some readers the impression that one out of every five schools in HISD is failing. The story has also been updated (below) to state the number of schools rated “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”)

Nearly nine out of every 10 Houston public school teachers are getting performance bonuses this year, even though one out of every five schools in the district has a low academic rating from the state.

Eighty-eight percent of the Houston Independent School District’s nearly 13,000 teachers will receive bonuses for their performance last year, the school district said.

The school system is handing out more than $42.4 million in performance bonuses to 16,500 employees. That includes 92% of its bonus-eligible employees, which include all of the district’s teachers and many non-teaching personnel, including principals and administrators. The bonuses will go to 99% percent of HISD teachers instructing students in core subjects like math, science and reading.

Close to 60 of HISD’s 298 schools received one of the two lowest accountability ratings from the Texas Education Agency last year: “Academically acceptable” or “academically unacceptable.” Students’ performance in core subjects like math, science and reading figure heavily into those ratings.

(UPDATE, 4:15 p.m. Thursday: Twelve HISD schools are rated “academically unacceptable,” and another 47 are rated one level higher, “academically acceptable.” Despite the name, HISD trustees have said in meetings that they cannot consider a school successful if it is merely rated “academically acceptable.)

The bonus program, called ASPIRE, is a key part of having an effective teacher in every classroom, according to a district press release. And having an effective teacher in every classroom is essential to HISD becoming “the best school district in the country,” HISD Superintendent Terry Grier said in the release.

“In order to reach our goal of being the best school district in the country,” Grier said. “We must make sure we have effective teachers like Andres Balp in every classroom…”

Balp, a bilingual teacher at Lyons Elementary, is receiving an ASPIRE bonus of $11,330, the largest teacher award in the district this year, according to HISD. The average teacher is getting $3,614. Lyons, near the Northline neighborhood of Houston, was rated “exemplary” by the state in 2010.

Grier told the Houston Chronicle that the bonus program may be in need of some changes:

“We’ve got to take a hard look at that program, and we’ve got to be willing to change it,” Grier said. “When you have 92 percent of your employees receiving a bonus, you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Is it really a bonus program, or is it a program where you’re spreading out $42 million?’”

HISD began ASPIRE in January 2007 and, since then, has given out more than $155 million in bonuses, which equals close to 10% of the district’s $1.6 billion annual budget. According to the district, ASPIRE is one of the largest performance pay programs in the country.

As the district prepares for up to $348 million in budget cuts from the state, it gave out close to $1.8 million more in bonuses this year than last year. More than half of the money for the bonuses will come out of HISD’s general fund, and the rest will be paid for using state and federal grant money.