The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) is a model merit pay* program being replicated all across the country. TAP awards teachers performance bonuses of $1-6,000 based on their impact on student achievement and observations in classrooms. Additionally, TAP selects master teachers to serve as mentors to less-experienced or struggling peers, and the mentors are eligible for $7-15,000 bonuses. It’s a promising model that’s likely to receive a significant boost from President Obama’s increase in funding for the federal Teacher Incentive Fund.
Yet, recent research on TAP’s implementation in Chicago schools found it to have no impact on student achievement or teacher retention. Some people are hailing this as the failure of the entire idea of compensating teachers for their observed performance, but let’s slow down a little bit and consider the Chicago findings alongside the results of another large-scale merit pay evaluations, notably, the one for Denver’s ProComp. Unlike TAP, teachers participating in ProComp were more likely to stay in their school and did improve learning outcomes for children.
The biggest lesson to learn from these evaluations is that not all experiments in merit pay are created equal. Unlike TAP, the option to participate in ProComp is available to individual teachers, so there’s likely to be greater evidence of teachers selecting into the option that fits them best. Similarly, because all incoming teachers are part of ProComp, Denver may attract different types of teachers who want to work there. This is exactly what happened: the greatest changes attributable to ProComp manifest because of the composition of the teaching workforce, not because individuals have a particular incentive in a given year.
The structure of the programs help define how they’re eventually seen by participating teachers. TAP includes a healthy dose of professional development, weekly 45-minutes team meetings, and mentor and master teachers to provide support. Teachers in the TAP program overwhelmingly support these elements, but the performance-based pay components in TAP have been found to have, “a minimal impact on how teachers view their jobs, and a moderate impact on teachers’ motivation to improve their performance.” Each TAP implementation is different than the others, since the program is negotiated at either a school or district level. In Chicago, classroom-level student achievement made up only 10 percent of the potential performance pay.
Participants in ProComp, even involuntary ones, view it differently. They see the program as a fundamental change that will improve recruitment and retention of teachers, focus teachers on the task at hand, motivate teachers to improve instructional practices, and ultimately improve student achievement (Principals generally agreed, but teachers who opted not to join ProComp are, not surprisingly, less likely to believe these things.). This, again, traces back to structure. ProComp places only a minor value on professional development, while reserving larger bonuses for teaching in hard-to-serve schools and subjects and producing student growth (at the teacher and school level).
One thing that’s very different in these two program evaluations is the focus on fidelity of implementation. Because TAP relies more on professional development, its success or failure depends on the quality of the training and the mentoring of teachers. It relies on “successful” mentoring, and so TAP’s evaluation talks a lot about how well the program was implemented. It relies on human connections to improve teaching.
That may be a fine model, but it’s not one followed by ProComp. ProComp is entirely based on objective, quantifiable information. If the teacher raised student test scores year-to-year, they get more money. If they completed a Master’s degree, they’re entitled to a bonus. If they taught in a high-needs school, that’s extra. Even the components containing some subjectivity, like receiving a satisfactory evaluation, are yes or no answers.
Structure mattered in teacher retention patterns as well. TAP schools showed no higher retention rates than non-TAP schools. Schools with high proportions of ProComp teachers, on the other hand, saw higher rates of retention, especially at hard-to-serve schools. It’s hard to think that this is not attributable to ProComp having a specific bonus of $2,400 for teachers staying in hard-to-serve schools. TAP has no such incentive.
These evaluations are both preliminary–this was the second of four evaluations planned for TAP and the first of two planned for ProComp–so it’s too early to declare one a dud and one a success. What the results show, so far anyway, is that structure and implementation decisions matter tremendously.
*I use the terms “merit pay” and “performance pay” interchangeably in this post.
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Your caution against rushing to larger judgments based on an isolated and preliminary study is important to emphasize. After all, the study included only eight schools with more than one year of data. TAP has achieved notable success in other large scale sites, including Louisiana, Texas and South Carolina, and is growing dramatically.
There are several inaccuracies in this blog that need to be addressed. Part of the reason for TAP’s success and growth is the comprehensive nature of its model. TAP is about more than just performance pay; it is a systemic school reform that also includes career advancement, ongoing data-driven professional development and a rigorous evaluation system. These elements must be deliberately aligned in order to achieve the desired results. As made clear in the Chicago study, all of these elements were not fully implemented in many CPS schools.
When appropriately implemented, TAP has drawn top teachers to some of the highest-need schools, and has reduced turnover among effective teachers. We have ample research and results that the most talented teachers remain in TAP schools. The TAP structure of career, mentor and master teachers builds the human capital necessary to drive progress in the school over time. With weekly professional development, ongoing feedback and field-testing, teachers are constantly working together to improve instruction and student achievement.
We should note that TAP participation is optional at the school level as each school must vote to implement the TAP model. We see schoolwide participation as the embodiment of comprehensive reform.
Effective school reform will always depend on human capital at the building level – recruiting, developing and retaining effective teachers. However, the performance compensation of TAP includes substantial percentages for student achievement. Teachers’ performance-pay bonuses are based 50 percent on students’ value-added growth. The remaining half is determined by a rigorous evaluation process that links the professional development and ongoing support of all teachers. The rubrics used in the TAP evaluation process have been linked to student achievement.
Effective implementation of TAP has had a powerful impact on thousands of teachers and students across the country.
-Jason Culbertson
Director of School Services
National Institute for Excellence in Teaching
I agree with Dawn. Besides, how do you then rate teachers of the lowest-performing special education students? (Forget the fact that NCLB will require, on average, 98% of all students in every school to achieve grade-level proficiency by 2014 — geez, people, have you ever actually TAUGHT a severely learning-disabled child?) How do you rate the speech-language pathologists who serve children in the schools? How do you rate art teachers? Or music teachers? Or teachers who only teach 6th and 7th grade science but not 8th, which is when kids in NYS actually take a state test? Do you reward a related services provider who teachers a child with LD how to break down an unfamiliar vocabulary word, thereby enhancing her ability to comprehend the question and enable her to actually answer it correctly? Or does the merit pay just go to the classroom teacher who may or may not have anything to do with actually building the child’s skills? Do you reward a papaprofessional who sits patiently with a child in special education and help him write down his notes and draw lines to connect concepts visually so he doesn’t have to try to process it all in his head? President Obama was such a beacon of hope, now he’s simply a disappointment. Race to the Top only puts poor schools (Title I, folks) out of the running by virtue of being poor. Like so many other formulas for improvement, you have to have money to get money. And it punishes teachers and other professionals who have only ancillary roles to the whole testing mess. Merit, indeed. I show up on time, I do my job in horrific conditions, and I help my students. What’s more meritorious than that?
This is all well and good but merit-based pay for raising test scores still does not “improve” learning. All it improves are test scores. We are raising a generation of kids who will know how to sharpen a #2 pencil and fill in dots; but who won’t be able to think critically, because by the time the teacher finishes telling them the answers to the essay questions and teaches them how to eliminate the 2 least likely answers on the multiple-choice parts, there’s no room for science experiments, exploring math concepts or sharing a learning experience.
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