Implementing Performance Pay for Principals: Findings From the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) I and II Grantees

• In Event: Roundtable Session 116
  In Roundtable Session: Principal Accountability: Measuring Performance for Merit Pay and Ongoing Improvement

Abstract

The National Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) gathered evidence on implementation of principal and teacher performance pay for the first two cohorts of TIF grantees. Based on that research, we address two main research questions in this paper: 1) To what extent are principal performance pay and supports under TIF aligned with research on educator performance pay? 2) To what extent did TIF grantees provide the support necessary for principals to adapt to new roles required by performance pay?
Program implementation was studied through review of proposals and annual reports provided by the Department, phone interviews with educators and district staff across all 33 grantees in the spring of 2010, and site visits to 12 grantees in the fall of the same year. Additionally, researchers analyzed award payments made to teachers and principals during the 2008-09 school year, allowing for comparisons of award amounts as well as the components (e.g., student achievement, evaluation results) across TIF grantees and between teacher and principal performance pay programs.
Research on measuring principal quality, as described in the two preceding papers, suggests it is important to evaluate principal quality along multiple dimensions. Reliance on student achievement alone is unlikely to provide a valid measure of a principal’s work particularly when the award is based only on change over a single school year. Yet principal performance pay programs relied heavily on student achievement as evidenced by the fact that: (1) principal programs pay a much greater portion of awards based on student achievement than teacher programs, and (2) even when principal programs utilize other measures of principal effectiveness, differences between small and large bonuses were often driven by differences in principals’ student achievement awards.
In addition to not awarding principals on multiple measures, principal programs rarely included the types of supports research would suggest might lead to improvements in school leadership. While projects sometimes relied indirectly on existing supports, few programs explicitly included supports for school leaders in the program design. This is in spite of the fact that performance pay is designed to substantially re-engineer schools, with myriad potential implications for school leaders. Findings from a small number of grantees that integrated supports into the principal program, however, exemplify possibilities for providing principals relevant supports. These grantees supported principals to improve their ability to assess instructional effectiveness, facilitate conversations about instructional improvement, and practice distributed leadership.

Authors

• H. Alix Gallagher, SRI International

• Kaily Yee, SRI International

• Ashley Z. Campbell, SRI International