Fresno Unified trustees have the chance to tie next superintendent’s pay to goals | Opinion
Fresno Unified is going to get a new superintendent. Current Superintendent Bob Nelson is stepping down this summer after more than six years of service. The district has faced hurdles during his tenure, including managing the pandemic response, but nothing is so central to the mission of a school district than the academic performance of Fresno’s children.
The pandemic had a huge impact on that performance. By every objective measure, including the state’s own yardstick — the Smarter Balanced (SBAC) assessments — academic achievement levels are down significantly throughout the state. FUSD has not escaped. During Nelson’s tenure, English performance declined from having 37% of kids considered “proficient” to 33%. And in math, the decline was from 27% to 23%. The starting points were not good to begin with, but having that decline is worse.
It would be unfair to blame the low level of academic performance on Nelson’s leadership. Correlation is not causation, but it’s clear that leadership did not overcome the hurdles or improve the education of Fresno’s kids.
Fresno Unified’s board now has a golden opportunity to do something different, to hire a superintendent and make improving education their first priority. Board President Susan Wittrup recognizes this need, with a recent Bee article quoting her saying, ““We need to take it to the next level, such as in test scores, our children could be doing much better academically….”
We can certainly hope that actually happens, but shouldn’t the education of our kids be based on more than hope?
Opinion
In 2022, according to data obtained from Fresno Unified and published on the Transparent California website, Nelson’s total pay was $394,960, with total compensation (including the cost of benefits) almost a half-million dollars — $482,585. We often hear parents gasp at those numbers. A half-million dollars is a lot of money, particularly in Fresno where the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average county resident made $51,126.
Fresno Unified is a large organization, with a total budget of over $2 billion. Some data show the average CEO of a company with total revenues over $500 million makes $1.4 million. By that standard, the FUSD superintendent is a bargain.
But there is a significant difference. In private industry, a huge portion of that compensation, often up to 50%, is based on meeting board-specified performance goals. A private CEO is held accountable by their board, by making sure the leader has a significant amount of personal skin in the game. If the CEO doesn’t improve something important to the company, that person loses out on a large part of the paycheck.
Not so in education, where superintendent pay is often dependent on nothing more than “what the last person was paid”, “time in the chair,” and the ability of a superintendent to convince the board that they’re trying — really hard.
Our boards of education don’t’ consider actually improving the education of our kids, not just trying hard, to be so important. Why do school boards not make sure the highest paid district employee is incentivized to accomplish the goals they define? Does that make sense?
Fresno Unified’s board has an opportunity to change that. The trustees can make sure their new superintendent is paying attention to their goals and priorities, by tying a portion of the super’s own pay to that attention.
The California State Dashboard provides a good way to define those goals. The dashboard is far from perfect but it is the state’s yardstick. Its metrics are understood, and it seems a reasonable starting point for determining objective measures. Budgets are important also. The budget is an objective view of the financial performance of a district; keeping that budget in the black would be a primary function of the leader of any organization.
A properly designed performance-based compensation program would include a few key measures that can be objectively determined. If the employee succeeds, the employee wins, the board wins, and — most importantly — the kids of the District win. Isn’t that what we all want?
Todd Maddison is the research director for Transparent California , a founding member of the Parent Association advocacy group, and a longtime activist in improving K-12 education. Maddison lives in Oceanside.
