Evaluation of Cohorts 1 and 2 of the Teacher Incentive Fund

• In Event: Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Designing and Implementing Educator Performance Pay Programs: Lessons From the Field

Abstract

Since 2006, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) has invested over $895 million in the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) provides federal grants to local education agencies, state education agencies, and nonprofit organizations in partnership with a local education agency to develop and implement performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools. This paper describes the projects, lessons learned from implementation, and educators’ perceptions of the preliminary outcomes from their performance pay projects using a theoretical framework of performance pay as a multi-faceted reform policy (author, 2011).
In 2006 and 2007, 34 grants were awarded to Cohorts 1 and 2 of the TIF program ranging from approximately $500,000 to $20 million over 5 years. Each TIF grantee designed a program with few required features that was substantially customized to local labor market issues. The data come from a 5-year evaluation of Cohorts 1 and 2 of the TIF program which, to date, includes case studies of 12 grantees, telephone interviews with participants from all grantees, a review of documents that grantees submitted to the Department, and analysis of $70 million in payouts made to 20,000 educators in 2009.
Prior research suggests that the size of award is related to the extent to which awards motivate teachers (Heneman, Milanowski, and Kimball 2007). Across grantees, the overall average award was large (six percent of a regionally-representative teacher salary and five percent of an average administrator salary), but there was considerable variation in the size of the average participant award by grantee. Analysis of payout data found differences in the logic models for performance pay implied by grantees’ varied programs. Researchers analyzed payout data to determine which factor—student achievement, additional roles (e.g., becoming master or mentor teachers), teaching in hard-to-staff schools or subjects, teacher evaluation, or multiple factors—was the primary contributor to differences between small and large performance pay amounts. Student achievement was the primary contributor to awards in 15 grantees, but rewards for taking additional roles, working in hard-to-staff positions, earning particular ratings on teacher evaluations, or some combination of these components was the primary driver of differences in small and large awards in the other 16 projects.
Implementation challenges included rebuilding data systems, developing understanding of and support for the new compensation system, and adding new evaluation responsibilities to already busy administrators or accomplished teachers. Further, grantees frequently grappled with changing the teacher and administrator culture, including deeply embedded conceptions about how educators relate to each other, how they should be judged, and how their performance should be differentiated. In short, TIF typically catalyzed changes that reached into all areas of the education system.
Performance pay is prominent in policymakers’ reform agendas, in part because of its commonsense appeal of paying teachers on the basis of how well they teach and how well their students learn. As states and districts embark on creating new compensation systems, they can look to the experience of the TIF grantees to provide some lessons.

Authors

• Daniel C. Humphrey, SRI International

• H. Alix Gallagher, SRI International

• Ashley Z. Campbell, SRI International