Deep Professionals in Challenging Circumstances: Exemplary Teachers in Public Charter Schools Serving Marginalized Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Relating School Organization and Practice to Educational Outcomes

Abstract

This study aims to understand how performance evaluations attached to extrinsic rewards, motivate educators to learn around instruction. The research was conducted within the framework of a Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) initiative adopted by three charter schools. Considering the weak impact of TIF on teachers’ practices reported in the field, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of why it might be that effects on practice are presumably so weak by taking a fine-grained look at teacher learning motivation under the spell of evaluations and incentives over a period of four years. We find that beliefs and dispositions towards evaluations and rewards are not uniform, but shift over time. Thus, longitudinal tracing of subtle dynamics helped us find crowding-out effects.

Authors

• Rick Mintrop, University of California - Berkeley

• Cristóbal Madero, University of California - Berkeley

• Miguel Ordenes, University of California - Berkeley