Mythomania Hug$ & Ki$$e$ Bonu$ Award

Well, there you go. Out of that September 19th Caucus meeting Privileged session comes the announcement of the Board of Mythomania's award of a Performance Bonus for Dr. Richard "Build the Trust" O'Malley for the school year 2011-12. This will be voted on at the September 24, 2012 Action Meeting. Now, this is perhaps one of the silliest things I've seen come out of Mythomania Lane in quite some time - not to mention a foolish waste of taxpayers money.

You can see my take on this Performance Bonus in the June 3, 2012 post - Board of Mythomania's Super Performance Criteria. Briefly, if you're gonna set quantitative and qualitative criteria for a performance bonus, then the criteria can't be vague and ambiguous as it is in the criteria set for Dr. O'Malley. If you do, then you can't have any meaningful evaluation, which is what you get now.

Take for example the NJ ASK Scores. Fifty percent (50%) of his bonus is predicated on increasing %'s scoring in the Advanced Proficient and decreasing %'s scoring in the Partially Proficient. Now, that's nice but with all due respect, what does increase and decrease mean? What's the % needed? What scores are they looking at to evaluate him - total scores, individual school scores or the related sub-group scores? Ditto for what scores they using to compare against. Finally, how are they distinguishing between the normal year to year improvement and O'Malley's contribution to this year's scores?

Point being that with this vague and ambiguous criteria there is no clear and meaningful way you can measure performance and therefore, they can measure it any way they want. So it goes for the other three (3) Board Goals used in O'Malley's Bonus Criteria. Throw in the fact that a simple reading of O'Malley's contract here puts into question whether he's even eligible for a performance bonus in the 2011-12 school year.

But the Performance Bonus Criteria isn't the point of this post. I'll have more to say on this whole matter after they vote on it Monday night.

What you want to be aware of is this bit of duct tape transparency going on over there on Mythomania Lane. Once again, we have an unsigned agenda for the September 29, 2012 Action meeting that fails to disclose O'Malley's Performance Bonus is up for a vote. It's not listed on the Summary on page one (1) of the agenda. Maybe it's me, but something that important you might want to highlight right up front. Be that as it may, you'll have to search through forty-two (42) pages of the agenda to find it listed on page 25.

And here it is:

Now, this is exactly why O'Malley shouldn't be let around any numbers and certainly not be allowed to present anything that has to do with numbers. You see, they're only showing you what criteria they believe has been met and how much they're giving him. What they're failing to show you is how they believe he measured up to all the performance criteria they set up. Shouldn't they be telling us about how they measured him against all the criteria and not just the criteria they gave him money for?

Remember, fifty percent of his bonus is based upon four (4) NJ ASK Scores weighted equally and the other fifty percent (50%) is based upon the other three (3) Board Goals for 2011-12 and are weighted equally.

Here's his Performance Bonus Criteria:

And here's what they did, but failed to show you, to come up with the numbers used in the Action Agenda for September 24, 2012:

As you can see, all the numbers in Red, were not included in their resolution for O'Malley's Performance Bonus.

As I said, this whole thing is a tad bit of a joke but they could of at least put out the results of their review of all these silly performance bonus criteria - and not just selected numbers.

Not that it matters but they made him eligible for the Max 2% of his $210,000 salary for 2011-12 or $4,200 and he earned, according to the Board, $2,625 of that $4,200 or 1.25%.

Anyhoo, here's what the numbers would be if he earned the entire 2%:

And here. what the Board says he actually earned:

Guess he only had half a facilities timeline done!

But hey, what do I know? I still can't figure out if this $2,625 is for Performance - then does that mean the $4,200 raise he already got is for Non-Performance?!?