Increasing Educator Effectiveness: Lessons Learned from Teacher Incentive Fund Sites

by Jonathan Eckert
February 2013
In Increasing Educator Effectiveness: Lessons Learned from Teacher Incentive Fund Sites, researcher and author Jonathan Eckert finds that approaches spurred by the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) to change the ways that educators are trained, supported, evaluated and compensated are "good investments" to strengthen teaching and learning. The report comes to these conclusions through the examination of the federal program's impact on teachers, students and policy-at-large at nine different sites in Louisiana, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Indiana and Tennessee. This is a follow-up to Eckert's 2010 report, Performance-Based Compensation: Design and Implementation at Six Teacher Incentive Fund Sites, funded by the Joyce and Gates Foundations.

The Effectiveness of TAP: Research Summary 2012

by NIET
April 2012
For over a decade, TAP™: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement has pioneered a comprehensive approach to school reform focused on the quality of teaching and the advancement of effective teachers in schools. This comprehensive system of reform is reaching about 20,000 teachers and 200,000 students across the country in the 2011-2012 school year. Researchers at NIET and elsewhere have studied TAP's effectiveness at raising student achievement, improving the quality of instruction and increasing the ability of high-need schools to recruit, retain and support teachers. This document describes some of the most important results that have emerged from the research to date.

Beyond Job Embedded: Ensuring That Good Professional Development Gets Results

by National Institute for Excellence in Teaching
March 2012
Recent research has proven that "job-embedded" professional development (PD) can improve instruction and student learning—if there is a sufficient infrastructure in place to support, oversee and reinforce it. In this report, NIET outlines how it uses TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement to ensure that "job-embedded" PD—professional development delivered by site-based teacher leaders during the school day—results in student academic growth. Specifically, NIET describes how TAP incorporates a structure to maximize the impact of collaborative learning teams and instructional coaching—both strategies that recent studies found to be potentially effective. TAP also takes the critical next step to support, oversee and reinforce PD through a range of other mechanisms, including explicit teacher leadership roles, clear but achievable responsibilities for principals, schoolwide instructional leadership teams, and alignment with other human resource strategies.

Algiers Charter Schools Association (ACSA) Report Demonstrates Significant and Sustained Progress under a Teacher Incentive Fund Grant

by Algiers Charter Schools Association
January 2012
The Algiers charter schools serve some of the highest-need students in New Orleans. In an effort to close significant achievement gaps, the leadership of each school, and of ACSA, made improving classroom instruction their top priority. A federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant enabled them to use the nationally proven TAP system to build instructional excellence in their schools. Now in the fifth and final year of TIF, schools in ACSA have closed the achievement gap and, in fact, their students now exceed state proficiency levels in English/Language Arts and math. ACSA schools have also increased their graduation rates to 94 percent. In addition, in the 2010-11 school year, 70 percent of ACSA special needs students graduated high school compared to a statewide graduation rate of only 40 percent. This is the kind of transformational change made possible by the Teacher Incentive Fund. The Report discusses Algiers schools' successes and challenges over the course of the grant and profiles each of the schools.

More than Measurement: The TAP System's Lessons Learned for Designing Better Teacher Evaluation Systems

by Craig Jerald and Kristan Van Hook
January 2011
As the longest-standing and most successful effort to radically revamp teacher evaluation using multiple measures including student achievement gains, TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement provides a powerful set of lessons learned. In this paper, researcher and writer Craig Jerald worked with Kristan Van Hook of NIET and TAP practitioners to distill the key elements of TAP's successful teacher evaluation into ten essential recommendations useful to states and districts in redesigning their own systems.

A Teacher Evaluation System That Works

by Glenn Daley and Lydia Kim
August 2010
The NIET Working Paper A Teacher Evaluation System That Works analyzes evidence from TAP's work in the field that validates the strength of TAP's evaluation system in differentiating effective from ineffective teaching; producing classroom evaluations and value-added student growth evaluations that are correlated with and complementary to each other; providing useful information to enable teachers to improve their practice over time; and contributing to an increase in the retention of effective teachers as compared to ineffective teachers. The Research Brief summarizes the findings.

Performance-Based Compensation: Design and Implementation at Six Teacher Incentive Fund Sites

by Dr. Jonathan Eckert
August 2010
Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Joyce Foundation, this paper presents an analysis of six sites that are implementing teacher and principal compensation reforms under the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). Of the six sites studied, four are implementing TAP. Through interviews, focus groups, data analysis and site-based observations, Eckert identified a number of similarities in the design and implementation of these projects. From Eckert's analysis, these common practices contributed to promising results in these six TIF sites and provide insight for states and districts looking to design effective performance-based compensation systems.

The Effects of Performance-Based Teacher Pay on Student Achievement

by Sally Hudson
July 2010
Published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, this study finds that schools implementing the comprehensive TAP system increase student achievement gains more than similar non-TAP schools. Conducted by Sally Hudson under the guidance of Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in Economics Caroline Hoxby, this paper examines the impact of TAP on student growth in 151 TAP schools in 10 states. Hudson evaluates the effects of TAP on state achievement exam scores in mathematics and reading using synthetic control matching. These student achievement results are particularly relevant as policymakers consider the impact of performance-based compensation reform applied as part of a comprehensive system supporting teacher and principal improvement.

Aligned by Design: How Teacher Compensation Reform Can Support and Reinforce Other Educational Reforms

by Craig Jerald for the Center for American Progress (CAP)
July 2009
Written for CAP by leading education researcher Craig Jerald, this report counteracts the failures of existing professional development and evaluation systems by citing TAP as a comprehensive system that reforms teacher compensation, along with other support structures, in an effective and sustainable way. Jerald uses TAP to illustrate the importance of building human capital at the school and district levels. The report notes that performance compensation for master and mentor teachers in TAP schools—the "less famous" aspect of this performance-pay reform—is essential to its ability to not only recognize and reward effective teaching but to also systemically generate improvements in teacher effectiveness.

TAP Brochure

The TAP brochure offers information about TAP's goals, elements and proven results in raising student achievement across a diverse set of urban, suburban and rural schools throughout the country. It also provides ways in which individuals, foundations and corporations can partner with TAP to help expand and sustain the system.

TAP System Training Portal Brochure

The TAP System Training Portal brochure provides an overview of the portal's features— including the extensive TAP Strategies Database and Video Library—as well as information about how to sign up.