From pay to personnel, changes in the principal’s office shed light on Vitti’s first year — and his plans for the next

Take a look at the Detroit district’s payroll, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Superintendent Nikolai Vitti has already brought major changes to the principal’s office.

Fully 17 new principals have been hired at the Detroit Public Schools Community District since Vitti took over the superintendent’s office last summer, and another nine have transferred to new schools. Pay is up 3 percent, and principals now report to “principal leaders” — former principals whom Vitti tasked with overseeing turnaround efforts building by building.

(Find salary and staffing data for principals in the Detroit Public Schools Community District below. Chalkbeat has requested but has not yet received salary data for charter school principals from Michigan’s education department.)

But more than a year into a turnaround effort led by Vitti, those changes are likely only a start.

Vitti spent much of his first year moving the district to a new K-8 curriculum and reshaping the central office. It’s common for turnaround districts to replace principals — an Obama-era school improvement grant even required it as a first step. While Vitti’s administration hasn’t yet sought to completely overhaul the principal corps, he said this week that deeper changes can be expected next summer.

“This will be the first year we focus more closely on performance (staffing, attendance, enrollment, climate and culture, and student achievement),” he wrote in an email. “Last year the focus was on operations and setting the right culture and climate in schools to begin implementation of this year’s reform.

“We are not satisfied with principal salaries right now,” Vitti added, saying he wants to further increase pay, especially for principals who help improve schools with especially low attendance or test scores.

Education experts see principals as a key ingredient in any u-turn school improvement efforts like the ones underway in many Detroit district schools. They say principals deserve as much credit as anyone for a successful school turnaround, and they note that when things aren’t going well, principals are very often the first to leave.

The pressure facing principals in the district is one reason Vitti hired four principal leaders, about one for every 25 principals in the district. Other districts have found that extra coaching for principals can pay off for schools, especially in large cities.

Staffing data obtained by Chalkbeat makes clear that changes to the principal corps are already a significant piece of Vitti’s legacy. Nearly one-third of the district’s roughly 100 schools have a new principal who was hired by Vitti’s administration.

Still, the district hasn’t seen the high level of principal turnover that often accompanies turnaround efforts.  Most of the departing principals retired or accepted a job elsewhere, Vitti said, and only a handful of school leaders were removed for low performance.

“We did not make more principal changes last year because we wanted to give principals the opportunity to learn and grow professionally,” he said. “Under emergency management, time and resources were not spent on building principal capacity to drive instructional reform.”

Despite a 3 percent raise this year, Vitti says pay for principals remains near the top of his to-do list. He wants to tie principal salaries to the size of the school, the principal’s performance, and the school’s historic performance. The idea is that principals should be paid more for helping a large, struggling school improve.

While it seems at first glance that principal salaries have already undergone major changes since June of 2017, Vitti says those changes are largely due to the district’s decision to treat principal as 12-month employees instead of nine-month employees. Under the previous system, principals who chose to work summer school received an additional stipend that didn’t appear in their overall salary, meaning their actual pay has changed less than it might appear on paper.

That’s why the data shows that the average salary for principals increased by 10 percent even though they only received a 3 percent raise.

Vitti said principals received raises if they took on more responsibilities at their current school or were transferred to larger or more challenging schools. Still, their salaries aren’t necessarily tied to their school or their level experience because principals in the district aren’t unionized and aren’t paid on a fixed scale.

There hasn’t been much change at the top of the pay range. While the top salary increased from $117,000 in 2017 to $131,000 today, the people earning those salaries — including the principals at Cass Technical High School, Cody High School, Pershing High Schools, and John R. King Academic and Performing Arts Academy  — remained the same. Cass is one of Detroit’s elite high schools, while Cody and Pershing are among its most troubled. John R. King is a large K-8 program with low test scores and high rates of chronic absenteeism.

Nearly half of the district’s 102 principals are clustered at the bottom of the pay range, making around $100,000 per year.

The lowest paid principals include dozens of returning principals, as well as new arrivals and two former Cass Tech teachers who Vitti tapped to lead Detroit School of Arts and Nolan Elementary-Middle School.

As the state of Michigan ratchets up accountability for principals, Vitti’s administration says higher pay will help attract replacements for principals who retire or who don’t cut muster.

While philanthropists have stepped up to help train some principals, the district no longer has an internal training program for school leaders. It ended during a decades-long period of declining enrollment, budget cuts, and administrative turmoil, which also led many Detroit administrators to flee for more stable suburban districts.

Jeffery Robinson, principal at Paul Robeson Malcolm X Academy, stuck it out for the last 11 years without a raise, and he says he welcomes the changes Vitti is proposing, especially the changes in pay. Even with the raise earlier this year, he says Detroit principals are still undercompensated compared to similar districts, especially taking into account the challenges their schools face. Principals in the district don’t have a union, but Robinson is part of a “focus group” that will meet with Vitti to hash out the details of changes to the pay scale.

Robinson says he supports the idea of paying principals based on the kind of school they manage.

“While both are complex, there are still some things that have to be managed at the high school level that don’t have to be managed at the K-8 level” he said.

Both Robinson and Wendy Zdeb, executive director of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals, say the most important figure isn’t how many principals have left the district — it’s how many have stayed in spite of the difficult conditions.

“I find that administrators in Detroit are really committed,” Zdeb said. “They’re the consistency of the district, when you really think about it.”

Correction: Dec. 18, 2018: A previous version of this story referred to salary data from 2016 and 2018. In fact, the numbers are from 2017 to 2018. This means they closely reflect the policies of Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, who started on the job in the summer of 2017.

 

See below for a list of current principals in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. You can search for names at the top right corner. Note that numbers are for 2018 and 2017, not 2018 and 2016.

Note that the pay increases evident in this table largely weren’t raises. Vitti shifted principals to a 12-month schedule instead of 10-month schedule, so their salaries rose. However, many had already been receiving that extra pay in the form of a stipend for running summer school.

Source: Detroit Public Schools Community District payroll as of June 2017 and October 2018. “NA” means the principal was not employed by the district in June 2017.