Teacher Incentive Fund: 

First Implementation Report, 

2006 and 2007 Grantees 

Prepared by:

Daniel C. Humphrey 

H. Alix Gallagher 

Kaily M. Yee 

G. Kyle Goss 

Ashley Z. Campbell 

Lauren J. Cassidy 

Nyema M. Mitchell 

SRI International 

Prepared for: 

U.S. Department of Education 

Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development 

Policy and Program Studies Service 

2012 
This report was prepared for the U.S. Department of Education under Contract number ED-04-CO-0040/0008 with 

SRI International. Andrew Abrams served as the project officer. The views expressed herein do not necessarily 

represent the positions or policies of the Department of Education. No official endorsement by the U.S. Department 

of Education is intended or should be inferred. 

U.S. Department of Education 

Arne Duncan 

Secretary 

Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development 

Carmel Martin 

Assistant Secretary 

Policy and Program Studies Service 

Stuart Kerachsky 

Director 

February 2012 

This report is in the public domain. Cover photo is used with the permission of Alix Gallagher. Authorization to 

reproduce this report in whole or in part is granted. While permission to reprint this publication is not necessary, the 

suggested citation is: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Policy 

and Program Studies Service, Teacher Incentive Fund: First Implementation Report, 2006 and 2007 Grantees,

Washington, D.C., 2012. 

This report is also available on the Department’s website at 

http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/opepd/ppss/index.html. 

On request, this publication is available in alternate formats, such as Braille, large print or computer diskette. For 

more information, contact the Department’s Alternate Format Center at 202-260-0852 or 202-260-0818. 

Content Contact 

Andrew Abrams 

202-401-1232 

andrew.abrams@ed.gov 
iii

Contents 

List of Exhibits .............................................................................................................................. v

Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... vii

Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................... ix

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1

The TIF Program........................................................................................................................2

Research Questions and Methods ..............................................................................................3

Characteristics of the TIF Projects ............................................................................................. 7

The TIF Grantees .......................................................................................................................7

Getting Started ...........................................................................................................................9

Eligibility and Participation .....................................................................................................10

Components of Performance Pay Projects ...............................................................................11

Payouts to Administrators and Teachers..................................................................................20

Implementation Findings ........................................................................................................... 35

Perceived Fairness of Performance Pay ...................................................................................35

Using Communication to Build Educator Understanding of Performance Pay ......................41

Collaboration and Competition ................................................................................................44

Motivation for Improvement....................................................................................................48

Leaders’ Role in Implementing Performance Pay ...................................................................51

Program Sustainability .............................................................................................................53

Perceptions of Outcomes ............................................................................................................ 55

Recruiting and Retaining Effective Educators .........................................................................55

Instructional and Leadership Practices ....................................................................................57

Student Achievement ...............................................................................................................58

Systems Change .......................................................................................................................59

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 61

References .................................................................................................................................... 63

Appendixes....................................................................................................................................65

 A—Interview protocols ...........................................................................................................67 

B—Profile of TIF grantees ......................................................................................................83 

C—Components of performance pay projects .........................................................................87 

D—Payout awards ...................................................................................................................97 

E—Comparison of Project Requirements Across TIF Cohorts .............................................111 

F—Glossary of terms .............................................................................................................121
iv
v

Exhibits 

Exhibit ES-1. Student achievement measures used to determine teacher incentive awards ........ xi

Exhibit ES-2. Percentage of participating teachers and administrators receiving an 

incentive award .................................................................................................... xiii

Exhibit ES-3. Primary factors leading to differentiation in teacher incentive award amounts .. xiv

Exhibit 1. Interview participants.............................................................................................. 5

Exhibit 2. Geographic distribution of TIF grantees ................................................................. 8

Exhibit 3. Components of teacher and administrator incentive awards ................................ 11

Exhibit 4. Student achievement measures used to determine teacher incentive awards ....... 13

Exhibit 5. Student achievement measures used to determine administrator 

incentive awards.................................................................................................... 15

Exhibit 6. Supports offered to teachers to improve practice ................................................. 18

Exhibit 7. Percentage of participanting teachers and administrators receiving an incentive 

award ..................................................................................................................... 22

Exhibit 8. Average incentive award as a percentage of base salary ...................................... 24

Exhibit 9. Incentive awards for educators in seven grantees with largest number of 

nonawardees .......................................................................................................... 25

Exhibit 10. Average incentive award size by quartile across 22 grantees awarding most 

teachers ................................................................................................................. 26

Exhibit 11. Incentive award amount differentiated by student achievement in one grantee ... 28

Exhibit 12. Incentive award amount differentiated by additional roles in another grantee ..... 30

Exhibit 13. Primary factors leading to differentiation in teacher incentive award amounts ... 31

Exhibit 14. Educator-reported perceptions of measures based on student achievement ......... 37
vi 
vii 

Acknowledgments 

Many individuals contributed to the completion of this report. We are grateful to the school 

staff who took time out of their busy schedules to respond to our requests for information, 

particularly the 34 grantees who were generous with both their time and attention to this 

evaluation work. Without their efforts, this report would not have been possible, and we deeply 

appreciate their assistance. 

We acknowledge the thoughtful contributions of the members of our Technical Work 

Group in reviewing study materials and prioritizing issues to investigate. The advisors were 

Suzanne Wilson, Jennifer King Rice, Dan Goldhaber, Ellen Goldring, Patricia King, Matthew 

Springer, and Peter Schochet. 

Many U.S. Department of Education staff contributed to the completion of this report. 

Andrew Abrams served as project manager and provided valuable substantive guidance and 

support throughout the design, implementation, and reporting phases of this study. We also 

acknowledge the assistance of other Department staff in reviewing this report and providing 

useful comments and suggestions, including Daphne Kaplan and Stuart Kerachsky. We 

appreciate the assistance and support of all of the above individuals; any errors in judgment or 

fact are the responsibility of the authors. 

The National Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund is supported by a large project 

team. Among the staff who contributed to the research were Jennifer A. Bland and Kaeli Keating 

from SRI International; Matthew Corritore, Stephanie D’Souza, Thomas Gonzalez, Jane 

Hannaway, Luke C. Miller, Ross Milton, Joel Mittleman, Miriam Okine, and Zeyu Xu from The 

Urban Institute; and Johannes Bos, Katie Hornung, Svetha Janumpalli, Emily Rosenthal, Juan 

Shishido, Fannie Tseng, and Phyllis Weinstock from Berkeley Policy Associates. Layout and 

editing were performed by Eileen Behr and Meredith Itner. 
viii 
ix

Executive Summary 

The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) supports projects that are designed to reform teacher 

and principal compensation. Initially, the Department of Education (the Department) made two 

rounds of awards, in 2006 and 2007, to a total of 34 grantees. The specific goals of TIF were to 

reward teachers and principals for improving student achievement, increase the number of 

effective teachers and principals in hard-to-staff schools, increase the number of effective 

teachers in hard-to-staff subjects, and sustain the project beyond the life of the grants. The 

specific requirements of the program have been refined in the third round of awards in 2010, 

although the goals of the program remain similar. This interim report describes the first two 

cohorts of TIF projects, examines their implementation experiences, and reports educators’ 

perceptions of the projects and what they accomplished. 

The experience of the first two cohorts of TIF grantees underscored the technical, cultural, 

and contextual complexity of compensation reform. Projects were implemented by these grantees 

in varying local contexts with shifting leadership, policy, and reform agendas. Many grantees 

reported having to rebuild their data systems, build understanding and support from educators for 

the new system, and add new evaluation responsibilities to administrators or accomplished 

teachers. In addition, many grantees had to develop support systems that would allow educators 

to make the changes necessary to succeed under a new compensation system. Moreover, grantees 

had to confront traditional attitudes and beliefs about how educators should be judged and 

differentiated. 

This interim report is part of a five-year national implementation evaluation (running from 

2008 to 2013) focused on the first two cohorts of TIF grantees. It is guided by a document 

review of proposals and reports, telephone interviews of key project staff, teachers, and 

principals from grantees, and site visits to 12 grantees. The final implementation report (expected 

October 2012) will include data from all previous data collection efforts, as well as surveys of 

teachers and principals from the 33 remaining TIF grantees, a second round of site visits to 

12 grantees, an examination of payout data, and an analysis of the distribution of effective 

teachers in two states with multiple TIF grants and third-party evaluations. 

Characteristics of TIF Projects 

Local education agencies (including charter schools that operate in their states as local 

education agencies), state education agencies, and nonprofit organizations in partnership with a 

state or local education agency, or both, were all eligible to apply for TIF grants. The 

Department awarded 16 Cohort 1 grants in November 2006 and 18 Cohort 2 grants in 

July 20071, ranging from approximately $500,000 to $20 million over five years.2 One grantee 

 

1

 In 2010, the Department awarded 62 Cohort 3 grants, which are not covered in this report. For further detail 

about Cohorts 1, 2, and 3 of the TIF program, including a comparison of the key features of each cohort, please 

see Appendix E. 

2

 Sources: U.S. Department of Education. (March 2010). Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). [PowerPoint 

presentation]. Retrieved from http://www.serve.org/uploads/files/TIF%20Presentation_3.30.10.pdf; Center for 

Education Compensation Reform website (http://www.cecr.ed.gov/); and documents grantees provided to the 

U.S. Department of Education. 
x

withdrew partway through data collection, leaving 33 projects still in operation.3 Of those 33 

projects, all offered performance pay to administrators (a requirement of TIF) and 31 offered 

performance pay to teachers.4

The 33 grantees were distributed across 19 states and the District of Columbia.5Seven 

grantees were located in predominately rural areas, and the rest were largely urban school 

districts or charter school networks. Grantees varied widely in their demographic composition, 

although they generally served schools with high concentrations of minority students and high 

proportions of low-income students, often above and beyond the TIF requirement of 30 percent 

of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. 

Eligible teachers and administrators participated in the TIF projects at high rates. 

Although TIF only required that the performance pay system include principals, almost 

all grantees (31) also included teachers in their projects. In most of these grantees, all teachers 

were eligible to participate; only three projects restricted teacher participation to those in “tested” 

subjects and grades (i.e., those for which there is an associated state assessment) or those that 

were Nationally Board Certified. In addition, 25 projects supplemented their TIF funds to 

include teachers’ aides, counselors, and other staff. 

Of the 31 grantees that included teachers in their projects, 12 made participation in their 

performance pay programs voluntary. Of those 12, eight had "opt-in" provisions. Under these 

provisions, an individual participant had to actively “enroll” in the system as well as meet 

performance criteria in order receive an incentive award. Generally, this “enrollment” process 

was not extensive and only required teachers to complete a simple form or check a box. In the 

remaining grantees, educators could elect to opt out if they did not want to participate. Most 

eligible teachers, though, did elect to participate, and teacher participation rates were below 90 

percent in only four projects.6 Administrator participation rates were also high across the board 

with nearly all administrators participating in all grantees. 

 

3

 The grantee that withdrew was one small charter school, Mare Island Technology Academy. During interviews 

with school officials, they reported the school lacked the capacity to fully implement its performance pay plan 

and the leadership was concerned about its ability to meet the financial matching requirements. Data discussed in 

this report include data collected from all 33 grantees. The Department has since withdrawn funding from one 

additional grantee, Lynwood Unified School District, which will no longer be included in future data collection 

activities. 

4

 In the remainder of the report, “teacher projects” refer to the portion of the 31 TIF projects that target teachers, 

while “administrator projects” refer to the portion of the 33 TIF projects that target administrators. Under these 

definitions, 31 TIF projects are composed of both a teacher and an administrator project, while the remaining two 

only have an administrator project. 

5

 One grantee is a consortium of charter schools from across the country. It was not included when counting the 

number of states with TIF grantees. 

6

 Project participation rates were calculated based on the number of administrators and teachers eligible for and 

taking part in any element of the program, regardless of whether or not they actually received an award. 
xi

Rewarding educators for improvements in student achievement was a central component 

of TIF projects. 

As required, all grantees rewarded principals for improved student achievement, while 

30 grantees7also rewarded teachers for student achievement. Measures of teacher contributions to 

student achievement varied and included status, growth, value added measures (VAM), 8or some 

combination of the three. With regard to teacher incentive awards, 12 grantees used VAM alone, 

seven used growth alone, and 10 used status combined with VAM, growth, or both to reward 

teachers (see Exhibit ES-1). Administrator incentive awards based on achievement were similarly 

arrayed, with 10 grantees making awards based on VAM alone, 12 using growth alone, one using 

only status, and the remaining 10 using some combination of VAM, growth, and status. 

Exhibit ES-1. Student achievement measures used to determine teacher incentive awards 

Exhibit reads: Twelve grantees used only VAM as a student achievement measure. 

Source: Project Documents, Interviews with grantees 

Note: Data pertain to the 30 grantees (out of a total of 31 grantees that gave incentive awards to teachers) that used 

student achievement measures to determine those teacher incentive awards. One of the grantees included in the 

VAM, Growth and Status column in this graph is actually a combination of four different projects implemented in four 

school districts across a state: two included only VAM, one included only growth measures, and one included both 

growth and status in their incentive award formulas. 

 

7

 In the 31st grantee that included teacher incentive awards, the union was not in favor of implementing a 

performance pay program and did not allow the project to include student achievement in the award formula at 

the teacher level, although there are incentive awards for student achievement given to principals. Instead, 

teachers in their program were given incentive awards for becoming a Nationally Board Certified teacher, 

teaching at a hard-to-staff school once certified, and delivering professional development to other teachers. 

8

 Status measures typically indicate the number of students who meet a set performance standard (e.g., Percent 

Proficient). Growth measures calculate a student’s progress between two points in time without consideration of 

the trajectory of the student’s prior performance. VAM, in contrast, assess changes in student progress compared 

with a prediction (based, for example, on the student’s prior performance trajectory) of how much their 

performance should have improved. 
xii 

TIF projects included more than just a series of pay for performance policies; they offered 

complementary supports designed to improve educator practice. 

Grantees varied greatly in how they rewarded educators for their performance, including 

whether groups or individual teachers were rewarded and how they handled individual teacherlevel incentive awards for teachers who do not teach tested subjects. Of the 30 grantees that 

offered performance pay to teachers based on student achievement, six rewarded teachers only at 

the school or group level (e.g. department or grade level), three rewarded teachers only at the 

individual level, and another 21 rewarded teachers at both the group and individual levels. Ten 

grantees gave teachers of untested subjects a lower maximum award than teachers in tested 

subjects, while two grantees designed projects that excluded teachers in untested subjects from 

receiving incentive awards. Four grantees developed tests or selected measures to cover every 

subject and every grade, and seven grantees adjusted the compensation formula for teachers in 

untested subjects, most often more heavily weighting schoolwide measures. 

In addition to student achievement measures, a majority of grantees made incentive awards 

to educators based on their evaluation results.9

Sixteen of the 31 grantees that included teachers 

in their projects directly tied incentive awards to measures of their teaching quality, typically 

assessed through classroom observations. Administrators at more than half of the grantees (18) 

received part of their performance pay based on the results of their job performance evaluations. 

The TIF legislation allows grantees to provide incentives for educators to work in hard-tostaff schools and subjects. Five grantees rewarded teachers for working in hard-to-staff schools, 

five grantees rewarded administrators for working in such schools, and eight grantees rewarded 

teachers for teaching hard-to-staff subjects. 

Most grantees recognized the importance of providing teachers opportunities to learn how 

to improve their practice. Ten grantees offered teachers additional pay for attending professional 

development, and at least 13 grantees provided teachers professional development in their 

schools through coaches and master and mentor teachers. Finally, some of the 16 grantees that 

incorporated formal evaluations into their performance pay formula used these evaluations as a 

professional development tool to help teachers improve their practice. 

While some grantees paid incentive awards to a small proportion of participants, the 

majority made awards to more than 95 percent of participating educators, and across all 

grantees the overall average incentive award was large. 

During the first round of data collection, researchers collected all available payout 

information for the 2008–09 school year from the 33 grantees. The grantees reported payments 

of approximately $70 million in incentive awards—$63 million to teachers and $7 million to 

principals. 

Projects typically used one of two strategies to give incentive awards to educators. In one 

scenario, only a small number of eligible educators received an award. A few grantees (7) 

 

9

 While evaluation systems can include student achievement, among the 33 Cohort 1 and 2 TIF grantees included 

in this study, we did not find this to be the case. Instead, student achievement and evaluation results were two 

separate components of their performance pay systems. Therefore, throughout the report, the term “evaluation” 

refers only to a system which encompasses classroom or school observations, the rubric used to score teacher 

and administrator performance, and any feedback that might be provided after the observations are completed. 
xiii 

followed this strategy, and this group included some of the larger grantees in Cohorts 1 and 2. In 

the other strategy, nearly all educators received some kind of award, the size of which varied 

based on degrees of achievement. Nineteen of 31 grantees made awards to more than 95 percent 

of teachers within their projects, and 17 of 33 followed this strategy for administrators (see 

Exhibit ES-2). 

Across grantees, the overall average incentive award was large (6 percent of a regionallyrepresentative teacher salary and 5 percent of an average administrator salary), but there was 

considerable variation across grantees in the size of the average participant award. Eleven 

administrator projects and seven teacher projects paid out less than 2 percent of an average 

salary, while 11 principal projects and 16 teacher projects paid more than 6 percent of a typical 

salary on average. 

Exhibit ES-2. Percentage of participating teachers and administrators receiving an 

incentive award 

Exhibit reads: Four grantees made incentive awards to between 0 and 24 percent of teachers and four grantees 

made incentive awards to between 0 and 24 percent of participating administrators. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 31 grantees that included teachers in their TIF project and the 33 grantees 

that included administrators in their TIF project. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in two 

grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

4

3

2

1

2

19

4 4

3

2

3

17

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

0–24 25–49 50–74 75–89 90–94 95–100

Number of Grantees

Percentage of Participants Receiving an Incentive Award

Teachers Administrators
xiv 

Of the 31 projects that made incentive awards to teachers, student achievement was the 

primary factor accounting for differences in these awards in 15 projects, while in 16 other 

projects, factors other than student achievement were the main determinants. 

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.10 Student achievement was the primary 

contributor to differences in incentive award size within 15 grantees, but rewards for taking 

additional roles, working in hard-to-staff positions, or some combination of these components 

was the primary driver of differences in small and large awards in the other 16 projects (see 

Exhibit ES-3). 

Exhibit ES-3. Primary factors leading to differentiation in teacher incentive award 

amounts 

Exhibit reads: Student achievement was the primary factor leading to differentiation of teacher incentive award 

amounts in 15 grantees. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 31 grantees that included teachers in their TIF project. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in two 

grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

A similar analysis of payouts for administrators revealed a very different pattern in the 

primary factors contributing to differentiation in their incentive awards. In contrast to teacher 

incentive awards, for administrators, variations in award amounts were driven almost entirely by 

student achievement components (25 grantees). 

 

10 For a more detailed discussion of this analysis, including how “primary factor” was defined, please see pages 24 

through 31. 

15

9

2

5

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

Student Achievement Additional Roles Hard-to-staff School

or Subject

Multiple Categories

Number of Grantees

Award Component
xv

Project Implementation 

The primary source of data on implementation is interviews with project staff, state and 

district leaders, educators, and other stakeholders, such as union members and school board 

members, conducted during phone interviews and the first round of site visits. These interviews 

suggested that the degree to which teachers’ perceived performance pay to be fair largely 

determined their support of the new compensation system. Teachers’ reports of their perceptions 

of the fairness of the incentive award system were related to their reported level of support for 

the compensation system. Teachers’ reported understanding of the performance-based 

compensation system is related with the thoroughness of the projects’ communication strategies. 

In addition, teachers’ reports of their interaction with each other varied across projects that had 

different program features, most commonly supporting additional collaboration despite the 

potential for competition. Teachers also reported that combining both intrinsic and extrinsic 

rewards in a performance pay program more strongly motivated them to improve their practice. 

Finally, teachers and administrators reported that implementation of the performance pay 

program was facilitated by system capacity, such as stable leadership and financial support. 

Eligibility for incentive awards, measures used, and accuracy of payments were tied to 

educators’ perceptions of their fairness. 

When interviewed, educators most often discussed fairness in relation to eligibility for 

incentive awards, the performance measures used, and the accuracy of award calculations. 

Eligibility for awards was often affected by the availability of test data, requiring grantees that 

provided teacher-level incentive awards for student performance to either exclude teachers of 

“untested subjects” (i.e., subjects or grade-levels that did not have a standardized test) from those 

measures or to develop alternate measures of performance for teachers of untested subjects. Both 

of these “solutions” to the problem of how to include teachers of untested subjects reportedly 

raised concerns about fairness. The choice of measures was a difficult decision for project 

leaders because currently there is no single valid and reliable measure of all aspects of educator 

performance (Goe, Bell, and Little, 2008). In spite of the technical improvements made in recent 

years to VAM (such that the most sophisticated models provide the best estimates to date of 

educator contributions to student outcomes), grantees had to choose among multiple imperfect 

measures. Educator interviews suggest that they did not understand VAMs and were particularly 

distrustful of them despite their apparent technical superiority to other measures. Finally, when 

the grantees’ data systems were unable to accurately identify and pay award recipients, 

participants perceived performance pay to be arbitrary and unfair. 

Grantees reported challenges with communicating their performance pay projects. Where 

there was an effective communication strategy, this helped to foster educator buy-in. 

Many grantees reported finding it challenging to effectively communicate with educators 

about the program. Reports from interviews with teachers and administrators suggest that 

grantees tended to have greater success building buy-in when they found ways to give educators 

a sense that they could help shape the project. Conversely, buy-in tended to be lower when 

educators perceived their voices were not a part of the planning process. 

TIF project leaders reported that communicating the intricacies of their project was one of 

their greatest implementation challenges. Grantees used a variety of formal mechanisms for 

communicating with educators, including newsletters, websites, formal presentations, and direct 
xvi 

contact. Project leaders reported that helping teachers understand the new performance pay 

system required intensive effort and that the most successful communication strategies required a 

sustained effort and a mechanism to respond to educator concerns. 

Educators reported that the projects were more likely to foster collaboration than 

competition. 

Research on collaboration and competition has long posited that competition can create a 

negative dynamic when individuals believe that the only way they can achieve their goal is for 

their colleagues to fail (Deutsch, 1949, 1962). Thus, critics of performance pay sometimes argue 

that it discourages teamwork and harms social cohesion in the schools (Miner, 2011). 

Educators in this study reported the view that the TIF projects promoted collaboration 

more often than they encouraged negative competition. The most common structure 

implemented by the projects to support individual improvement through collaboration was the 

use of mentor or master teachers. Many grantees also established collaborative meeting times 

and provided schoolwide incentive awards in an effort to encourage and support collaboration. 

In addition, educator reports suggested that some grantees may have incited a positive 

form of competition, in which educators held themselves and their colleagues accountable for 

meeting goals, thus competing against their own prior performance. Alternatively, a tournament 

system in which either the number of winners is limited or the total payout is limited has the 

potential to encourage competition between educators. While counterintuitive, educators did not 

view these structures as creating a competitive atmosphere in their schools. 

Both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards reportedly motivated teachers in TIF programs. 

In TIF performance pay projects, rewards in the form of increased compensation were 

intended to motivate teachers and administrators to improve their practice. TIF grantees also 

provided supports for professional growth (e.g., professional development) that were intended to 

increase the intrinsic rewards of teaching or being a school administrator. At the same time, a 

few projects implicitly (usually not explicitly) attempted to draw on some teachers’ and 

administrators’ failures to earn incentive awards to motivate them to leave the profession. 

There is a rich literature on features of the occupational culture of teaching that emphasizes 

intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic ones, and the reluctance to differentiate teachers by their 

effectiveness (Lortie, 1975). Performance pay, with its emphasis on financial rewards tied to 

measures of teacher effectiveness, tends to run counter to this view of the culture of teaching. 

When teachers and administrators in this study were asked if the TIF awards motivated a change 

in their behavior, the responses ranged from claiming money was irrelevant to expressions of 

appreciation for “the pat on the back;” only a small minority respondents indicated they were 

motivated by the monetary incentives. Others reported being motivated by the intrinsic rewards 

of improving their practice and meeting goals. 

Based on these educator responses, projects that created structures through which teachers 

could improve their practice (intrinsic award) and effectively used signals created by financial 

awards (extrinsic awards) to build educators’ investment in the improvement effort have the 

greatest potential for enhanced teaching and learning. In other words, educators perceived value 

in the combination of supports for improvement and motivation to take advantage of those 

supports.
xvii 

Educators reported low turnover among leadership improved implementation. 

Project leaders, administrators, and teachers reported that project implementation was 

enhanced when the superintendent in the district and the principal in the school consistently 

placed performance pay at the top of their reform agenda. Districts where top leadership changed 

and the new leadership set different priorities encountered many implementation challenges. 

Within grantees, implementation often varied at the school level, with implementation 

proceeding more smoothly in schools where leadership established a culture focused on 

improving instructional quality and embraced performance pay. 

In the current environment, it is challenging to develop sustainable funding for 

performance pay projects. 

Based on interviews with project staff, 15 grantees found external grants to support the 

increased personnel costs associated with performance pay in the short term. Grantees were 

slower to make fundamental changes to build in sustainability, although at least four secured 

long-term revenues or cut some aspect of personnel costs. Three grantees planned to entirely 

alter the teacher salary schedule. In the grantees that did not receive additional performance pay 

grants and did not find sufficient places in their budget to cut costs to fund performance pay 

awards, sustainability appeared unlikely. 

Since grantees received their initial TIF awards, local budgets have declined, in some cases 

precipitously, across the country. Budget cuts have made meeting the required match and 

ensuring sustainability even more challenging than when grantees made their initial proposals. 

Perceived Outcomes 

Ultimately, the outcomes that matter are related to improvements in teaching quality and 

student learning, which are not directly assessed by this study. Rather, this study did ask teachers 

and administrators about their perceptions of changes in educator recruitment and retention, 

teacher collaboration, teacher effectiveness, and student outcomes. Although many respondents 

were cautious about the extent to which they attributed changes solely to TIF, respondents 

generally reported a sense that TIF was having some positive effects. 

Grantees generally reported perceptions that the program was having favorable effects on

teacher retention and improved teacher collaboration and practice. 

Respondents in 12 grantees reported feeling that their TIF project contributed to better 

teacher retention, but few reported feeling that their project was a recruitment tool. Respondents 

in five grantees reported that TIF was at least partially responsible for ineffective teachers 

leaving the workforce. Respondents in five grantees reported perceptions of positive effects of 

TIF on the recruitment and retention of effective principals. 

Educators across grantees reported believing that the structures put in place to promote 

collaboration were helping to improve teacher practice and increase teacher collaboration and 

collegiality. Many respondents were reluctant to express any view about likely impacts of the 

program on students. However, many grantees reported feeling that TIF had the potential to 

improve student outcomes. 
xviii 

Some grantees saw TIF as part of broader, systemic reform. 

Perhaps the most significant perceived outcome was the view among some grantees that 

compensation reform was one piece of a broad change in their education system. In these places, 

grantees built compensation reform on a foundation of improved evaluation systems, new 

professional development approaches, redesigned principals’ roles and responsibilities, 

aggressive use of data, enhanced assessment systems, curriculum alignment with standards and 

assessments, and high expectations for principals and teachers. 

 Conclusion 

The experiences of the first grantees underscore the complexity of implementing 

compensation reform, in part because of its intersection with the human resources, management, 

and instructional systems of a district and school. This experience also illustrates some of the 

significant technical challenges in implementing compensation reform, especially those 

associated with measuring educator effectiveness and dealing effectively with political 

challenges associated with building educator understanding and support. 

Notably, the experience of the TIF grantees revealed variation in implementation from 

school to school. TIF projects encountered schools ready to embrace performance pay, schools 

that rejected the idea, and schools in between. The variations within and across grantees, in terms 

of the design and implementation of programs and the contexts in which they were enacted, 

should serve as a cautionary tale for policymakers eager to quickly introduce fundamental 

change to educator compensation. Notwithstanding the challenges grantees faced, their 

experiences and successes are instructive for others interested in implementing performance pay. 
1 

Introduction 

The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) is a federal program designed to promote changes in the 

ways teachers and principals are compensated in order to reward effective educators and attract 

these effective educators to high-need schools and content areas with the ultimate goal of 

improving student achievement. The program encourages grantee school districts (including 

individual or coalitions of charter schools that operate in their states as school districts), state 

education agencies, and nonprofit organizations in partnership with a local education agency, or 

a state education agency, or both, to initiate projects that give awards educators for their 

effectiveness rather than for their years of experience and education level. 

As part of a national evaluation of the first two cohorts of TIF grantees (awarded in 2006 

and 2007), this interim report documents the early implementation of TIF projects. It presents 

data from recent case studies of 12 grantees, telephone interviews with participants from all 

34 grantees, and a review of documents that grantees submitted to the U.S. Department of 

Education (the Department). 

Overall, the experience of the first two cohorts of TIF grantees reveals the technical, 

cultural, and contextual complexity of compensation reform. As the grantees learned, 

implementing compensation reform required more than adding bonuses on top of the traditional 

salary schedule. Projects were implemented in varying local contexts with shifting leadership, 

policy, and reform agendas. Many grantees reported having to rebuild their data systems, build 

understanding and support from educators for the new system, and add new evaluation 

responsibilities to administrators or accomplished teachers. In implementing their projects, 

grantees were forced to grapple 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. To support educators who might be 

motivated by the new compensation plan, grantees also had to develop systems that would 

enable the educators to make the changes in their practices necessary to succeed under that plan. 

In short, TIF catalyzed changes that reached into all areas of the education system. 

This interim report explores these challenges and highlights some of the more ambitious 

efforts to reinvent educator compensation in the first two cohorts of TIF grantees. The final 

implementation report will draw on additional evidence from a second round of TIF grantee case 

studies, surveys of teachers and administrators, and analysis of the most recent round of award 

payout data. To begin this report, we summarize the basics of the TIF program and describe our 

research questions and methods. The rest of the report is divided into four sections. First, the 

report describes the variation among TIF grantees and their performance pay projects. The 

second section provides detailed analyses of the findings regarding the first two cohorts of 

grantees’ implementation of TIF projects. The third section offers a description of the perceived 

outcomes of the TIF project from the grantees’ perspective. The report ends with conclusions on 

lessons learned from grantees’ experiences. 
2 

The TIF Program 

In 2006, the Department of Education launched the TIF program and established five goals: 11

1. Improve student achievement by improving teacher and principal effectiveness 

2. Tie teacher and principal compensation to increases in student achievement 

3. Increase the number of effective teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subjects 

4. Create sustainable performance pay systems.

5. Examine multiple approaches to providing teacher incentives. 

In 2006 and 2007, the Department made a total of 34 TIF grants to three state education 

agencies, 23 local education agencies, and eight nonprofit organizations across two cohorts. One 

grantee withdrew, leaving 33 participating grantees at the time of data collection.12

The TIF program set few stipulations on grantees, thus allowing for a range of project 

designs tailored to local needs. The Department had the following requirements: 

Grantees had to propose differentiated compensation for principals but not necessarily 

teachers. 

Differentiated compensation was to be based “primarily on student achievement gains 

at the school and classroom levels.” 

Grantees were required to conduct classroom evaluations two or more times per year 

for a teacher to receive an award. 

Grantees had to provide educators with incentives for undertaking additional 

responsibility and leadership roles. 

TIF funds could be used only for high-needs schools (schools with more than 30 

percent of enrollment from low-income families). 

Grantees with existing performance pay programs could apply for TIF funds to expand 

their program. 

Grantees were required to conduct an evaluation of their TIF project.13

In the final year of their grant, grantees were required to pay 75 percent of 

differentiated compensation costs from sources other than TIF funds. 

 

11 The TIF program was first authorized in P.L. 109-149, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, 

and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2006, Title V, Part D. The five goals listed were 

established by the Department of Education and included in the cover letter in the TIF Cohort 1 and 2 application 

package. 

12 One grantee withdrew partway through data collection, leaving 33 projects still in operation. The grantee that 

withdrew was one small charter school, Mare Island Technology Academy. During interviews with school 

officials, they reported that the school lacked the capacity to fully implement its performance pay plan and the 

leadership was concerned about its ability to meet the financial matching requirements. Data discussed in this 

report include data collected from all 33 grantees. The Department has since withdrawn funding from one 

additional grantee, Lynwood Unified School District, which will no longer be included in future data collection 

activities. 

13 As part of our evaluation activities, we collected information about grantee evaluations. However, the quality of 

these evaluations varied dramatically and did not consistently yield useful data for further analysis. 
3 

In 2010, a third round of awards was made, and while the specific requirements of the 

program have been refined, the goals of the program, as discussed above, remain similar. 14

For purposes of clarification, the term performance pay is used to refer to the reforms 

sometimes referred to as “merit pay,” “pay for performance,” and “incentive pay.” Performance 

pay denotes systematic efforts to compensate educators for their performance or the performance 

of their students. This definition reflects the lessons from recent research (see Heneman, 

Milanowski, and Kimball 2007; Podgursky and Springer 2006) and is sufficiently broad to 

encompass the full range of the TIF grantees’ projects. 

Research Questions and Methods 

The report addresses the following research questions: 

What are the main characteristics or components of local TIF performance pay plans 

in terms of strategies (incentivizing educators to increase student learning, attracting 

more effective educators to specific schools or content areas, and rewarding educator 

knowledge and skills), targets (all professional staff; principals and academic teachers; 

principals only, schoolwide or classroom), and size of incentive awards (in absolute 

terms as well as percentage of teacher salaries and expenditures)? 

To what extent are grantees implementing performance pay systems as planned? 

What system supports (planning and buy-in, clear communication, program and 

funding stability, adequate data systems, and alignment with other human resource 

policies) and broader contextual factors impede or enhance implementation of 

performance pay systems? 

In terms of stakeholder satisfaction and percentage of a district’s personnel budget that 

is used for performance pay, what evidence exists that the performance pay systems 

are being established in the local grantee sites? What does this evidence indicate about 

prospects for sustainability beyond the life of the grant? 

As a first step in data collection, researchers analyzed extant data on the 34 original 

grantees’ individual projects by reading their proposals and annual performance reports. 

Additionally, researchers analyzed documentation about planned and existing local evaluations, 

ranging from abbreviated logic models to full-blown annual reports, from the 20 grantees that 

submitted them to the Department. The study’s leadership trained the entire research team to 

code the documents for information on grantee characteristics, the design of performance pay 

projects, reported implementation progress, and the evaluation plan. Researchers used a 

 

14 Cohort 3 of the TIF program (competed in 2010), which is not covered in this report, changed some of the grant 

requirements. For example, grantees were required to include teachers in their program and to base performance 

awards on an objective, evidence-based rubric for teacher evaluations as well as on gains in student achievement. 

Funding for Cohort 3 was also set aside for grantees selected to be part of a national evaluation, which included 

additional specific requirements for program design than those required of other grantees. Finally, although 

Cohort 3 grantees must still contribute an increasing share of the differentiated compensation costs from non-TIF 

funds each year, the requirement that grantees must pay 75 percent of these costs from non-TIF funds by the final 

year of their grant was eliminated. For further detail about Cohorts 1, 2, and 3 of the TIF program, including a 

comparison of the key features of each cohort, please see Appendix E. 
4 

structured form to create a profile for each grantee, which was used to develop a policy brief for 

the Department, protocols for qualitative data collection, and material for training researchers for 

later data collection activities. 

The research team conducted telephone interviews in spring 2010 to obtain an update on 

project design and implementation from multiple perspectives within each grantee. Interview 

protocols (included in Appendix A) covered local contextual factors, planning processes, project 

design and implementation, the local evaluation, and perceived outcomes. Each grantee was 

assigned a pair of researchers who conducted interviews. Across all grantees, researchers 

conducted 266 telephone interviews with project leaders, district and school staff members, 

union representatives, and other stakeholders, such as School Board members and evaluators. As 

part of the telephone interviews, researchers gathered the most recent payout data on the teacher 

and administrator incentive awards. Once grantee interviews were completed, site visitors used a 

structured debriefing guide to report objective facts and preliminary analyses to the broader 

research team. The entire research team then met to discuss emerging themes. Analysts 

subsequently coded debriefing guides based on these key topics and emerging themes. The 

research team prepared an internal memorandum to the Department based on the telephone 

interviews. 

From September through November 2010, the evaluation team conducted two- to four-day 

site visits to 12 of the TIF grantees. The purpose was to gather more in-depth data in a 

representative sample of grantees. The researchers selected grantees for site visits using a 

stratified random sample. All grantees were assigned strata by grantee cohort, payment of 

incentive awards based on teacher evaluations, and prior experience with performance pay. 

Although the grantees were not stratified on characteristics such as urbanicity, type of grantee, or 

implementation of a specific project model, the resulting sample varied on those dimensions as 

well. Site visitors used the same training, data collection, and analysis processes as the telephone 

interviewers. Researchers conducted a total of 349 interviews during the site visits, with 

participants similar to those represented in the telephone interviews—project leaders, district 

staff members, educators, and stakeholders, such as school board members—but with larger 

samples of teachers and school leaders. Exhibit 1 shows how interviews were distributed across 

various types of respondents for both the phone interviews and site visits. Because phone and site 

visit interviews were both the most current and extensive data collected, they are the main source 

of data used in the current report, unless it is stated otherwise. 
5 

Exhibit 1. Interview participants 

Respondent Type Phone Interview Site Visit Interview

Project directors and co-directors 42 15

District leaders and project staff 57 43

Evaluators and data managers 54 14

Union or association representatives 20 6

Teachers 47 218

School leaders 37 47

Other stakeholders 9 6

Total 266 349

Exhibit reads: Forty-two phone interviews and 15 site visit interviews were conducted with the “Project directors and 

co-directors” respondent type. 

The evaluation’s current and upcoming activities include administration of principal and 

teacher surveys, a second round of site visits, an analysis of award payout data, an analysis of the 

distribution of effective teachers in two states, and a review of local evaluations of each grantee. 

The surveys, designed to gather data from a representative sample of educators across all 

grantees, are being administered from January to June 2011. A second round of site visits and 

collection of award payout data will take place during fall 2011. Researchers will examine the 

distribution of teacher quality in Florida and North Carolina, which have multiple TIF grantees 

and sophisticated data systems that allow longitudinal tracking of students linked to teachers and 

schools over time. The researchers will not estimate the student achievement effects of TIF but 

will examine changes in the teacher workforce. Finally, the research team will collect, analyze, 

and summarize the remaining 33 grantees’ local evaluations. The research methods described 

above are designed to complement each other and enable the evaluation to contribute to the 

larger body of research on educator performance pay. 
6 
7 

Characteristics of the TIF Projects 

The TIF grants were awarded to a range of districts, schools, and other entities. From a 

district in Alaska with schools accessible only by plane or boat to large urban school districts to 

charter schools, TIF grantees in the first two cohorts represented the full range of the nation’s 

rural and urban schools. Grantees’ approaches to compensation reform varied as well, as they 

developed performance pay systems that both adhered to program guidelines and accounted for 

local circumstances. 

This chapter of the report describes the characteristics of the TIF projects. It begins with an 

overview of the grantees and how they launched their TIF projects. From there, the chapter 

describes the breadth of projects in terms of eligibility requirements and participation rates. Next, 

the chapter describes the ways grantees gave awards to educators for student achievement, 

evaluation results, and filling high-demand positions. The chapter concludes with a detailed 

description of the actual incentive awards that were made to teachers and administrators, 

highlighting the variation in award size and identifying the accomplishments and activities that 

were most valued by the projects’ performance pay systems. Throughout, it is clear that grantees 

made the most of the flexibility allowed in project design to structure their reform attempts in 

ways that responded to local contexts. 

The TIF Grantees 

Local education agencies, state education agencies, and nonprofit organizations in 

partnership with a local education agency, a state education agency, or both were eligible to 

apply for TIF grants. The Department awarded 16 Cohort 1 grants in November 2006 and 

18 Cohort 2 grants in July 2007, ranging from approximately $500,000 to $20 million over 

five years.15 One grantee withdrew, leaving 33 participating grantees at the time of data 

collection. 

These 33 grantees were widely distributed across more than 19 states and the District of 

Columbia.16 Seven grantees were located in predominately rural areas, and the rest were largely 

urban school districts or charter school networks (see Exhibit 2). 

 

15 Sources: U.S. Department of Education. (March 2010). Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). [PowerPoint 

presentation]. Retrieved from http://www.serve.org/uploads/files/TIF%20Presentation_3.30.10.pdf; Center for 

Education Compensation Reform website (http://www.cecr.ed.gov/); and documents provided by grantees to the 

U.S. Department of Education. 

16 One grantee is a consortium of charter schools from across the country. It was not included when counting the 

number of states with TIF grantees. 
8 

Exhibit 2. Geographic distribution of TIF grantees 

Notes: This exhibit shows the location of the 33 grantees in operation at the time of data collection. Urban and Rural 

are based on the NCES classifications in the Common Core of Data. For this report, Urban includes City and Suburb 

classifications; Rural includes Town and Rural classifications. 

The New Leaders for New Schools grantee consisting of a consortium of charter schools implementing Effective 

Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) is not depicted because of its large geographic spread across many states. 

In Ohio, South Dakota, and Northern New Mexico, multiple locations are implementing a statewide TIF grant. South 

Carolina has two TIF grants operating within the state in multiple locations. 

Grantees varied widely in their demographic composition, although they generally served 

schools with high concentrations of minority students and high proportions of low-income 

students, often above and beyond the TIF requirement of 30 percent of students receiving free or 

reduced-price lunches. (Appendix B provides basic descriptive data on the 33 grantees.) This 

requirement limited the schools that some grantees could target. Yet almost half of the grantees 

(14) were able to implement districtwide reforms and make all schools eligible for their 

performance pay projects because either all the schools met this poverty threshold or the grantees 

supplemented TIF funds with other sources of funding to cover those additional schools. 

Grantees varied not only in their observable characteristics but also in the extent to which their 

previous experience with performance pay influenced the implementation of the TIF project. 
9 

Getting Started

Twenty-three of the 33 grantees had prior experience with performance pay. Such 

experience often provided them with lessons learned and served as a barometer of receptivity of 

teachers, administrators, and union leaders to performance pay. Thirteen of the grantees used TIF 

to expand their existing performance pay projects. Expansions included adding schools to a 

project, offering incentive awards to more educators, adding award categories, and increasing the 

size of awards for project components. For example, one grantee used TIF funds to add a 

principal performance pay project to its preexisting teacher performance pay system. Another 

grantee used TIF to extend administrator performance pay from a small group of the neediest 

schools to a districtwide project and add a principal evaluation component to the performance 

compensation scheme. 

Several grantees were able to use this prior experience to inform the planning process of 

their current performance pay projects, according to interviews conducted in those sites. One 

grantee, for example, reported that a previous project had been discontinued because teachers 

and administrators had become overburdened with paperwork so it avoided this mistake in the 

development of its TIF project. In some grantees, past experiences with performance pay were 

predictive of how successfully the implementation process proceeded. For example, when past 

projects had struggled with implementation problems, grantees reported that they were 

challenged by that legacy. In two cases when teachers reported that a previous project had not 

paid incentive awards because of a lack of funding, that experience led them to mistrust that 

funding for TIF would continue. 

Only about one-third of grantees reported choosing to use the first year of their grant as a 

planning year. Grantees that had a planning year generally found it very beneficial. As one 

project director said, “I feel like if we had rushed implementation it might not have been as 

successful.” Overall, grantees without planning periods reported that they needed one. Grantees 

that did not have a full year to plan TIF implementation often took a few months at the start of 

the grant to bring various aspects of their project online. Regardless of its duration, grantees used 

the planning time to convene groups of stakeholders to refine plans and build support. The 

planning committees formed at this time often remained in place through implementation, in 

some cases helping guide grantees through major project revisions. For example, one grantee 

found that the model used to calculate payouts in the first year was overly complex and caused 

confusion and anger among district teachers. The next year, the planning committee decided to 

use a simpler, more flexible model for calculating payouts. Grantees attempting innovative 

compensation reforms required ongoing planning processes to ensure that the project could 

respond to educators’ needs while helping them adapt to changes in their compensation. 

To support grantees in project refinement and implementation, the Department established

the Center for Educator Compensation Reform (CECR) to provide ongoing technical assistance 

and develop resources to share on its website. In practice, the amount of technical assistance 

grantees received varied, depending on their perceived needs and their awareness of and 

receptiveness to the supports available. The close alignment between project monitoring and 

technical assistance reportedly made some grantees feel uncomfortable admitting the need for 

technical assistance. Grantees that did receive this assistance found it to be valuable in designing 

their TIF projects. 

The remainder of this chapter describes the projects grantees created. 
10

Eligibility and Participation 

As the Department interpreted the TIF legislation, grantees had to implement their TIFsupported performance pay systems for principals, but could also include instructional staff. 

Twenty-eight projects allowed all teachers to participate regardless of subject or grade level 

taught, and three more projects included a substantial number of teachers but restricted eligibility 

to those who taught tested subjects or were Nationally Board Certified. 17 Principals in all 33 

grantees were eligible to participate (as required by program regulations), and of the 32 grantees 

that had assistant principals, 30 included them in their projects. Furthermore, many included 

even more staff than the teachers and administrators allowed under TIF regulations by using nonTIF funds. Twenty-five projects used funding from other sources to include at least some 

“noninstructional” staff (e.g., counselors, teachers’ aides) in a performance pay plan. Most 

grantees appear to have gone out of their way to ensure that nearly all employees were eligible 

for some type of incentive award, but extending eligibility was only part of maximizing a 

project’s reach; educators also had to decide to participate. 

Of the 31 grantees that included teachers in their projects, 12 made participation in their 

performance pay programs voluntary. Of those 12, eight had “opt-in” provisions. Under these 

provisions, an individual participant had to actively “enroll” in the system as well as meet 

performance criteria in order receive an incentive award. Generally, this “enrollment” process 

was not extensive and only required teachers to complete a simple form or check a box. In the 

remaining grantees in which participation was voluntary, educators could elect to opt out if they 

did not want to participate. 

While some believe that educators are opposed to performance pay, participation rates 

among teachers and administrators in TIF projects were high. In 2008–09, the participation rate18

was 100 percent in 22 of the 33 grantees. Even among the 12 teacher projects that were voluntary 

where teachers had a choice of “opting in” or “opting out” of the projects, most eligible teachers 

chose to participate. Five had participation rates of 100 percent, and only four had a participation 

rate below 90 percent.19 Participation was even higher among administrators, with nearly all 

administrators participating in all grantees. With only a few exceptions, almost all teachers and 

administrators on TIF campuses were both eligible for and participated in TIF projects.

 

17 One of the three projects completely restricted eligibility to tested subjects only at the middle school level. All 

high school teachers were eligible for at least one type of award, and some elementary classroom teachers could 

be paid for school-level growth. Additionally, that particular grantee had a professional development component 

that all teachers were required to participate in, but participation was not associated with an award. Another 

project targeted only Nationally Board Certified teachers in addition to administrators. Therefore, in the rest of 

this report, we describe 31 teacher pay for performance programs. 

18 Program participation rates were calculated based on the number of administrators and teachers eligible for and 

taking part in any element of the program, regardless of whether or not they actually received an award. 

19 Of the four projects below 90 percent, three either had or was perceived to have had considerable burden 

associated with participation. For instance, in one grantee, teachers had to complete 70 hours of professional 

development beyond what the district expected of them. In the other grantee, teachers reported a high frequency 

of errors in the computer system used for them to register their participation in the project, leading to 

misunderstandings about whether or not teachers had opted in, low participation, and eventually formal 

grievances. Data suggest that if the system had had fewer glitches, the participation rate would have been higher 

in this grantee. 
11

Components of Performance Pay Projects 

TIF was never designed to be merely a compensation program, and grantees created 

projects with components that encompassed both financial rewards and other types of supports 

for educators to improve their practice. Projects included a complex blend of activities and 

reward structures but in general had three main components: 

1. Compensation of administrators and teachers for their performance, measured 

primarily by gains in student achievement and often by evaluations. 

2. Incentives for teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools or subjects in order to 

redistribute teachers to schools and subjects most in need. 

3. Incentive awards for undertaking activities designed to improve professional 

practices, including attending professional development and assuming additional 

roles. 

Not surprisingly given the TIF legislation, almost all grantees that gave incentive awards to 

teachers included student achievement as one of the award components and all administrator 

projects had student achievement as an award component (see Exhibit 3). About half of the 

grantees (for both teacher and principal projects) also based incentive awards on evaluation 

scores, which directly measured teacher or principal quality. Teacher and administrator projects 

differed, however, in the frequency with which they included components for hard-to-staff 

schools or subjects and supports for improving practice. 

Exhibit 3. Components of teacher and administrator incentive awards 

Exhibit reads: Thirty grantees compensated teachers for their performance as measured by student achievement and 

33 grantees compensated administrators for their performance as measured by student achievement.. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 31 grantees that included teachers in their TIF project and the 33 grantees 

that included administrators in their TIF project. 

Source: Project documents, interviews with grantees. 

30

16

12

23

33

18

5

7

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Student Achievement Evaluations Hard-to-Staff School

or Subject

Supports for

Improving Practice

Number of Grantees

Award Components

Teacher Administrator
12

Pay for Performance 

Giving incentive awards to administrators and teachers for their performance rather than 

basing compensation solely on a traditional salary schedule is a hallmark of performance pay. 

Under the traditional salary schedule, teachers’ salaries are determined by years of teaching 

experience, credentials, and university course work or other professional development. Research 

has shown that these are not strong predictors of student achievement (Hanushek et al. 2005; 

Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin, 1998; Rockoff 2004; Goldhaber 2006). TIF requires that grantees 

link educator pay to student achievement, which moves grantees away from paying teachers 

based on characteristics that are weakly related to student outcomes to paying directly for desired 

outcomes. Grantees also were required to evaluate teachers at least twice a year and could choose 

to link administrator and teacher incentive awards to evaluation results. 

Giving Incentive Awards to Teachers and Administrators for Student Achievement

Among the 31 grantees that gave incentive awards to teachers, 30 rewarded them at least in 

part for improvements in student achievement. 20 However, the grantees varied significantly in 

how and at what level (classroom or school) they measured student achievement and how they 

addressed the issue of making awards to teachers who do not teach tested subjects. Administrator 

incentive awards were based primarily on the performance of the students in their school, and a 

variety of measures were used to assess that performance. 

Grantees based incentive awards on a range of student performance measures. Statewide 

standardized tests were used by all but one grantee, and at least eight grantees used other 

standardized measures (e.g., Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills [DIBELS], 

Northwest Evaluation Association [NWEA] assessments) to expand the grade levels covered by 

tests. Additionally, three grantees used district- or teacher-created tests as the basis for 

performance awards for teachers for whom standardized measures did not exist. On the basis of 

these tests, grantees could calculate three types of measures: status, growth, and value-added 

measures (VAM). Status measures typically indicate the number of students who meet a set 

performance standard (e.g., Percent Proficient). Growth measures calculate a student’s progress 

between two points in time without consideration of the trajectory of the student’s prior 

performance. VAM is a more complex version of growth that assesses changes in student 

progress compared with a prediction based on their prior performance trajectory of how much 

their performance should have improved. Additionally, five grantees calculated at least some 

portion of performance awards based on teacher-developed metrics. Teacher-developed 

measures are based on growth or status measures from a variety of tests, but they are classified 

separately because decisions about how to measure acceptable performance were often left to 

individual teachers and administrators. 

 

20 In the 31st grantee that included teacher incentive awards, the union was not in favor of implementing a 

performance pay program and did not allow the project to include student achievement in the award formula at 

the teacher level, although there are incentive awards for student achievement given to principals. Instead, 

teachers in their program were given incentive awards for becoming a Nationally Board Certified Teachers, 

teaching at a hard-to-staff school once certified, and delivering professional development to other teachers. 
13

To measure teachers’ contribution to student achievement, 30 grantees used some kind of 

growth measure or VAM, and none used status measures alone (see Exhibit 4).21 Moreover, half 

of the grantees reported using a VAM or some combination of VAMs with growth or status 

measures. Grantees using VAMs typically contracted with an external organization to calculate 

their VAM scores. 

Exhibit 4. Student achievement measures used to determine teacher incentive awards 

Exhibit reads: Twelve grantees used only VAMs as a student achievement measure. 

Note: Data pertain to the 30 grantees (out of a total of 31 grantees that gave incentive awards to teachers) that used 

student achievement measures to determine those teacher incentive awards. One of the grantees included in the 

VAM, Growth and Status column in this graph is actually a combination of four different projects implemented in four 

school districts across a state: two included only VAM, one included only growth measures, and one included both 

growth and status in their incentive award formulas. 

Source: Project documents, interviews with grantees 

Using these various measures, grantees made incentive awards to teachers for student 

achievement based on individual classroom performance or schoolwide performance. Proponents 

of individual classroom incentives argue that they can more accurately reflect variation in 

 

21 In categorizing measures as a growth measure versus a value-added measure, we deferred to state and grantee 

self-description of the measures. 

12

7 

0 

3 

1 

5 

2 

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

Number of Grantees 

Student Achievement Measures 
14

teacher quality, which is masked by group incentives, and serve as a stronger motivator to 

improve teaching. Advocates for schoolwide performance incentives, however, argue that they 

promote collaboration, ameliorate the potential for competition, and under some circumstances 

might provide stronger motivation for improvement than individual performance measures.22

Among the 30 grantees that provided incentive awards to teachers for improvements in student 

achievement, a majority (21) tried to balance both sides of this argument by giving awards both 

at individual and group (grade, department, or school) levels. Six grantees gave awards to 

teachers only at the group level, and three grantees awarded teachers only at the individual level 

(Appendix C1).23

Grantees that gave awards to teachers for student achievement at the individual teacher 

level struggled with how to compensate teachers who do not teach tested subjects (e.g., art, 

music, early elementary) and therefore have no student achievement results upon which to base 

incentive awards. The 24 grantees that paid based on achievement at the individual teacherlevel24 chose to address this issue in a variety of ways. Two grantees designed projects that 

excluded teachers in untested subjects from receiving incentive awards, and 10 designed their 

projects so that teachers in untested subjects were not eligible for all components and did not 

qualify for the maximum award. Four grantees found a way to link all their teachers to some type 

of test score, including one grantee that developed tests to cover every subject and every grade. 

Seven other grantees ensured that teachers in an untested subject could earn the maximum 

incentive award by making other measures of performance, most often schoolwide test scores, 

count for a larger portion of the award formula for them than their colleagues in the tested 

subjects and grades. Finally, one grantee that gave awards to teachers at both the group and 

individual levels allowed for considerable autonomy in how its 10 participating schools dealt 

with teacher-level awards. 

Student achievement was also a key performance measure for administrators in all 

33 grantees, and as with teacher incentive awards, grantees used status, growth, VAMs, or some 

combination of the three, to reward administrators for student achievement (see Exhibit 5).

Seventeen of the 33 grantees used VAMs, either by itself or in combination with another 

measure, to make the awards, and one grantee used only status measures as the basis for awards. 

Not surprisingly, administrator incentive awards for student achievement were all based on 

school-level performance. 

 

22 For a discussion of these issues see Neal (2009) and the Center for Educator Compensation Reform at 

http://www.cecr.ed.gov/researchSyntheses/Research%20Synthesis_Q%20C15.pdf 

23 In three cases, grantees used multiple methods to reward teachers for achievement, and they are included in the 

count of grantees that made awards both at the individual and group levels. In some cases, this varied based on 

how long a particular school had been in the project (e.g., schools did group awards only in year one but awarded 

for individual performance later in the life of the grant), and in one grantee, multiple projects were implemented 

in four separate districts across a state. 

24 This count includes the 21 grantees that paid at both the group and individual teacher levels as well as the three 

that paid only at the individual teacher level. 
15

Exhibit 5. Student achievement measures used to determine administrator incentive 

awards 

Exhibit reads: Ten grantees used only VAMs as a student achievement measure. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 33 grantees that included administrators in their TIF project. The one grantee 

included in the VAM, Growth, and Status column was a combination of four different projects implemented across a 

state: two paid on VAM only, one on growth only, and one on growth and status. 

Source: Project documents, interviews with grantees 

Teacher and Administrator Evaluations

Although student achievement is one of the desired ultimate outcomes of teaching, 

standardized student achievement tests do not assess all desired student outcomes. Additionally, 

many factors other than educator quality affect student achievement. For these reasons, there is 

interest in developing improved measures of educator quality to use as part of performance pay 

projects. Although the TIF program set few stipulations on grantees, one requirement was that 

grantees evaluate participating teachers two or more times per year. Whether those evaluation 

results were to be tied to incentives was not prescribed, but 16 of the 31 grantees that included 

teachers in their project directly tied incentive awards to these evaluations.25 For example, in 

 

25 While evaluation systems can include student achievement, among the 33 Cohort 1 and 2 TIF grantees 

included in this study, we did not find this to be the case. Instead, student achievement and evaluation results 

were two separate components of their performance pay systems. Therefore, throughout the report, the term 

“evaluation” refers only to a system which encompasses classroom or school observations, the rubric used to 

10

12

1

5

1

3

1

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

Number of Grantees

Student Achievement Measures
16

grantees implementing the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), schools set threshold 

evaluation scores, and teachers who meet the threshold are eligible for an incentive award. The 

exact award amounts are then determined by the distribution of evaluation scores. All teachers 

receiving the same evaluation score get identical incentive award amounts, so if there are three 

teachers who receive a “5” (the maximum score), they would all receive the same award amount, 

which would be larger than a teacher who received a “3”. Four other grantees used satisfactory 

evaluation results as a precondition for teachers to receive an award (i.e., teachers must be 

evaluated multiple times a year and/or they must receive a specific score on their evaluations to 

be eligible for an award). 

Recent reports have made the limitations of traditional teacher evaluation systems clear 

(Pecheone and Wei 2009). One implication of these findings is that traditional teacher evaluation 

systems provide poor measures upon which to base performance pay. Grantees moved away 

from their existing evaluation systems by having non-administrators conduct formal teacher 

evaluations (at least 10 grantees) or using a rubric specifying performance levels across multiple 

domains to evaluate a teachers’ performance (at least 16 grantees). Teachers in TAP, for 

example, were observed multiple times per year by the principal, a master teacher, or a mentor 

teacher using the four dimensions of the TAP rubrics (instructional, learning environment, design 

and planning, and responsibilities). The textbox, “Evaluation Rubrics Across the Grantees,” 

provides additional information about these new evaluation systems. 

Evaluation Rubrics Across the Grantees 

Sixteen grantees paid teachers based on the results of administrative evaluations. While the exact rubrics 

used to perform these evaluations varied, the most common starting point was Charlotte Danielson’s 

Framework for Teaching, which consists of four broad domains of teacher practice: planning and 

preparation, the classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. Within each 

domain, teachers are given detailed scores on specific components of their practice. 

Each component is supported by a long list of characteristics of practice, allowing evaluators to give more 

specific feedback and more elaborate evidence for a given score. For example, one grantee used a rubric 

based closely on the Danielson framework that listed seven different characteristics of practice that 

needed to be present for a teacher to receive the top score for managing student behavior. There were 

also six explicit characteristics for the middle score and six for the bottom rating. To receive the highest 

rating, a teacher was expected to demonstrate mastery of all seven descriptors including items like “uses 

several techniques such as social approval, contingent activities, and consequences to maintain 

appropriate student behavior when appropriate” and “overlooks inconsequential behavior when 

appropriate.”

Sources: The Danielson Group's The Framework for Teaching, interviews with grantees 

For some of the 16 grantees that incorporated classroom observations and ratings of 

instructional practice into teacher performance pay formulas, the formal evaluations served not 

only as a measure of teacher performance but also as a kind of professional development tool to 

help teachers improve their practice. In these grantees, either trained teacher leaders (e.g., master 

or mentor teachers) or administrators conducted observations using a rubric that clearly defined 

the desired instructional practices and created a common language for describing what “good” 

instruction looks like. The results of these evaluations were then discussed and analyzed to 

 

score teacher and administrator performance, and any feedback that might be provided after the observations 

are completed. 
17

determine areas of weakness and to set goals for future growth. As one teacher said about her 

evaluation system (which was based on the Danielson Framework for Teaching), “It’s a form of 

PD [professional development] and helps each of us to grow. It is much more of a conversation 

about the practice of teaching and teacher capacity and also improving the leader’s capacity to be 

an in instructional leader and not just building manager.” 

Administrators at a little over half of the grantees received performance pay for the results 

of their evaluations. In 11 sites, the evaluation focused on their performance as a school leader 

and manager. For example, in one case, the school’s board used a rubric covering school 

sustainability, financial concerns, and general operations to determine administrators’ evaluation 

awards. Administrators in eight of the 18 grantees were explicitly evaluated on the 

implementation of their particular performance pay project. One TAP site is included in both 

counts: A portion of administrators’ evaluation awards were based on the results of the 

Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED), a 360-degree review completed 

by teachers and the principal’s supervisor that measures the effectiveness of school leadership 

behaviors that influence teacher performance and student learning such as setting high standards 

for learning and building a culture of professionalism; another portion was based on an 

evaluation of TAP program implementation. 

Incentives to Recruit and Redistribute Teachers and Administrators to 

Hard-to-Staff Schools or Subjects 

The TIF legislation allows grantees to provide incentives for educators to work in hard-tostaff schools and subjects. This responds directly to one of the core criticisms of the traditional 

salary schedule, namely that it is insensitive to variations in the labor market demands for 

educators to teach in subjects (e.g., mathematics, science, or special education) or schools with 

chronic shortages. The impetus to give teachers incentive awards in this manner is based on the 

logic of supply and demand. When the supply of teachers does not meet the demand of highneeds schools and subjects, price (or compensation) must be adjusted to incentivize principals 

and teachers to redistribute themselves to areas with the highest need, creating a new equilibrium 

in supply and demand. 

Five grantees (out of the 31 grantees that included teachers in their project) gave additional 

compensation to teachers for working in hard-to-staff schools, five grantees (out of the 33 that 

included administrators in their project) gave administrators incentive awards for working in 

such schools, and in eight grantees, teachers received awards for teaching hard–to-staff subjects. 

Additionally, five grantees (out of the 33 grantees) targeted higher need schools in their state or 

district for TIF, making their entire project a form of hard-to-staff bonus. Finally, other grantees 

reported, to varying extents, that they hoped TIF would give them a competitive advantage in the 

local labor market in which they are not perceived as the most desirable employer. In these ways, 

most grantees used TIF funds in an attempt to redistribute high-quality educators to high-priority 

schools and subjects. 

Supports for Improving Practice 

The findings of the recent study in Nashville have spurred debate over whether incentives 

alone are enough to influence educators to increase student achievement (Springer et al., 2010). 

Recognizing the importance of providing teachers with opportunities to learn how to improve 

their practice, grantees sought to balance incentives with the support needed to earn them, which 
18

varied widely from grantee to grantee. Exhibit 6 displays the number of grantees employing 

some of the more common supports. 

Exhibit 6. Supports offered to teachers to improve practice 

Exhibit reads: Ten grantees offered additional pay for attending additional professional development. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 31 grantees that included teachers in their TIF project. 

Source: Project documents, interviews with grantees 

At one end of the spectrum, grantees encouraged more teachers to take advantage of 

existing professional development opportunities, and 10 grantees offered teachers additional pay 

for attending these types of activities, which included familiar formats (e.g., workshops after 

school, reimbursement for college classes) as well as more recently developed reforms (e.g., 

implementing a professional learning community [PLC] model). 

At the other end of the spectrum, at least 13 grantees offered teachers new opportunities to 

take on instructional leadership roles in their schools as coaches and master or mentor teachers. 

These roles were designed to be learning opportunities for the teacher leaders as well as the 

teachers they worked with. Furthermore, this approach has the potential to transform the teaching 

profession by changing the way teachers interact with each other and offering a way for teachers 

to progress in their career without becoming administrators. The textbox, “Improving Practice 

Through Coaching and Mentoring,” provides more detail on coaching and mentoring. 

10

13

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

Pay for Attending Additional PD Coaching and Mentoring

Number of Grantees

Supports for Improving Practice
19

One-third of the 33 grantees implemented one of two national program models, the 

National Institute of Excellence in Teaching’s Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) or New 

Leaders for New Schools’ Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC). Each has core 

components designed to support improvements in educator practice.26 TAP has four core 

components: (1) multiple career paths, (2) ongoing applied professional support,

(3) instructionally focused accountability, and (4) performance pay (described in textbox, 

“TAP Program Components,” below). 

 

26 For more information on TAP, see http://www.talentedteachers.org/. For more information on EPIC, see 

http://www.nlns.org/epic.jsp. 

Improving Practice Through Coaching and Mentoring 

In one grantee, TIF funds provided additional resources to hire instructional coaches, 

often teacher leaders from within the district, to work directly with teachers on their 

instructional practices. According the project director, these coaches served as a critical 

link between the improvements that the district would like teachers to make and paying 

them for getting these higher results. 

Across all schools in this grantee, these coaches were reported to have been instrumental 

in providing professional development and served as a useful resource for teachers in 

helping them plan their curriculum, look at data, and facilitate collaboration time between 

teachers in the building they work in. At one school, for example, the instructional coach 

signed an agreement with teachers whereby they, in conjunction with the coach and the 

principal, identified a goal to work on for six weeks. During that period of time, they 

received support from the coach on strategies they could use to achieve that goal, 

including observations and feedback to reflect on what they had done and what more they 

needed to do to reach the goal. In addition, the coach at this school was responsible for 

leading PLCs and professional development workshops during the school year and 

throughout the summer. At another school, the coach was available to model a lesson for 

the teacher in her classroom if there was technique that a teacher was struggling to 

master. 

Teachers and school leaders said that these coaches were one of the most positive 

aspects of the TIF program, particularly for new teachers, and that it was the aspect that 

they believed would be most likely to actually lead to a change in teacher practice. 
20

For the four grantees implementing the EPIC model, the program offers teachers and 

school leaders supports by identifying effective instructional practices and disseminating them to 

educators. Grantees implementing EPIC used a schoolwide VAM to identify their highest 

performing schools. After the announcement of award recipients, educators in those schools then 

work with a team from New Leaders for New Schools to document their effective practices using 

case studies and, at times, videos. EPIC then posts this documentation of effective practices on 

its website so that educators can see examples, although interviews suggested that few educators 

in TIF’s EPIC grantees regularly consulted the website. 

As this section of the report has shown, the grantees gave educators additional pay for 

student achievement, for job evaluation results, and for filling high-demand positions, and they 

supported educators to improve their practice and earn awards through professional 

development, coaching and mentoring, and feedback from evaluations. Next, we present data on 

the amount of incentive awards teachers and administrators received. 

Payouts to Administrators and Teachers 

During the first round of data collection, researchers collected all available information 

related to payouts for the 2008–09 school year from the 33 grantees.27 Those data show that the 

33 grantees paid approximately $70 million in incentive awards to approximately 20,000 

educators (out of the total of pool of around 45,000 participants)—$63 million to teachers and $7 

million to administrators. These figures reflect all incentive payouts—from both TIF and nonTIF sources—in schools that received at least some TIF funding. This section examines the 

amount of incentive awards teachers and administrators received in three ways. First, we look at 

the number of awardees and non-awardees to describe the ease or difficulty of receiving an 

incentive award. Then we use the best available grantee average salary data for administrators 

and teachers to describe the average incentive payments as a percentage of base salary. Finally, 

 

27 Two grantees provided payout data from 2007–08 because a delay in receiving state test results had created a 

backup in payouts. 

TAP Program Components 

Implemented by seven grantees, the Teacher Advancement Program is a comprehensive school 

reform system that provides opportunities for career advancement and extensive support to 

teachers. In this model, master and mentor teachers serve as a cornerstone of the support 

provided to participating teachers and principals. Strong career teachers are identified and 

provided with opportunities to be mentors or master teachers for their colleagues as steps along a 

career path. After additional training, they are then tasked with leading “cluster” meetings 

(collaborative weekly professional development sessions) and working with teachers to share best 

practices they have field-tested in classrooms with small groups of students. 

The TAP teacher observation and evaluation rubric, as discussed above in “Evaluation Rubrics 

Across the Grantees,” is also focused on instructional practice. It has reportedly helped to guide 

changes in teacher practice, as one English teacher noted when describing her experience with 

the TAP rubric, 

[The TAP rubric] make[s] you question what you are doing in class.... I wish I had 

time to go through it every day. It really does make you aware of what you are 

doing in class....
21

we examine the sources of variation between the largest and smallest awards within each grantee 

to determine what made the difference in the amount of educator compensation, which provides 

a signal for what accomplishments and activities were most valued. 

Percentage of Participants Receiving Awards 

Projects used one of two basic models to award educators. In one scenario, only a small 

number of teachers or administrators received an incentive award while the rest of the 

participants received no incentive. Winners in these grantees typically received a set amount with 

minimal variation between the highest and lowest payout for incentive award winners. Variation 

was binary: teachers and administrators either received a fixed incentive award or they received 

nothing. The other general model for making awards to teachers and administrators was to give a 

bonus to nearly everyone but vary incentive award amounts based on degrees of achievement. 

Exhibit 7 shows that the majority of projects followed the second model and paid incentive 

awards to nearly all participants. While the payout data in total showed that only about 20,000 

out of 45,000 participants won incentive awards across the 31 projects that included teachers, 

most non-awardees came from the nine grantees that restricted incentive awards to a smaller 

number of teachers (and gave incentive awards to anywhere between 6 to 67 percent of 

teachers).28 In the remaining 22 projects, there were just over 13,000 participating teachers; only 

about 600 received no incentive award. The same pattern existed in the administrator portion of 

the 33 projects; only 10 grantees paid incentive awards to less than two-thirds of participants. 

 

28 These nine included some of the programs with the largest numbers of participants, which helps explains why 

less than half of participants overall (20,000 out of 45,000) earned awards, even though the majority of projects 

paid awards to nearly all participants. 
22

Exhibit 7. Percentage of participating teachers and administrators receiving an incentive 

award 

Exhibit reads: Four grantees made incentive awards to between 0 and 24 percent of teachers and four grantees 

made incentive awards to between 0 and 24 percent of participating administrators. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 31 grantees that included teachers in their TIF project and the 33 grantees 

that included administrators in their TIF project. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in the case 

of two grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

The variation in incentive award size within TIF projects is discussed in the “WithinGrantee Differences in Incentive Award Amounts” section below, but first we turn to a 

discussion of average award size. 

Average Incentive Award Payment 

Prior research has suggested that if the size of the award falls below a certain threshold, 

awards have little potential to stimulate improved outcomes. This research suggests that 

incentives that are less than 2 percent of base pay are insufficient but that incentives greater than 

about 4 percent might be effective (Heneman, Milanowski, and Kimball 2007; Odden and 

Wallace 2007; Varadarajan and Futrell 1984). 

Relative to findings of prior research, the incentive awards TIF grantees paid as a 

percentage of base salary were quite large (see Exhibit 8). Across the 31 teacher projects, the 

average incentive award was 6 percent of a regionally representative teacher salary.29 The 

 

29 Each grantee’s incentive awards were compared with a relevant benchmark salary. Wherever possible, these data 

were collected from the grantee, but in cases in which average salary was unavailable for teachers, 

4

3

2

1

2

19

4 4

3

2

3

17

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

0–24 25–49 50–74 75–89 90–94 95–100

Number of Grantees

Percentage of Participants Receiving an Incentive Award

Teachers Administrators
23

administrator projects, although slightly smaller, still averaged nearly 5 percent of an average 

administrator salary. On an absolute scale, those incentive awards equated to an average 

incentive across projects of nearly $2,800 for teachers and $3,800 for administrators.30 The 

maximum awards were considerably higher as a percentage of the average local salary: The 

average site had a maximum teacher bonus of 23 percent of the average salary, whereas, on 

average, administrators could expect to reach 11 percent. 

Although the overall average incentive award across grantees was large, there was 

considerable variation in the size of the average participant award by grantee. 

 

administrators, or both, the researchers relied on averages taken from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor 

Statistics 2008 data. 

30 There were two possible measures for what the “typical” educator earned under TIF, the median and the average. 

The selection of which measure to use was challenging because of the distribution of incentive award levels in 

some grantees. Some grantees had relatively few teachers who received incentive awards that were substantially 

higher than those of most of their peers. Because averages are sensitive to outliers, the median appeared to be a 

better choice. However, in seven grantees, more than half of the participants did not receive any incentive award. 

In those grantees, the median award for participants would have been $0, which does not convey what incentive 

award recipients earned. Dropping participants who earned no incentive award from the analysis would lead to a 

figure that was a poor representative of what the typical participant received. Under expectancy theory, educator 

motivation is likely to be linked both to the amount of the incentive award and the expectation that an award is 

achievable (Kelley, Heneman, and Milanowski 2002). Dropping those who earned no incentive award would 

potentially overestimate the motivational effects of a particular award system (Taylor, Springer and Ehlert 2009). 

Given the data, using the average for all participants appeared to be best way to summarize the distribution in a 

single number. See Appendix D for details on incentive award levels. 
24

Exhibit 8. Average teacher and administrator incentive awards as a percentage of base 

salary 

 

Exhibit reads: Seven grantees gave awards to teachers that were between 0 and 2 percent of their base salary. In 

11 grantees, administrators received an incentive award that was between 0 and 2 percent of their base salary. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 31 grantees that included teachers in their TIF project and the 33 grantees 

that included administrators in their TIF project. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in the case 

of two grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

Many of the teacher projects represented in the lowest groups of Exhibit 8 are there not 

because their actual incentive award amounts were smaller than 2 (or 4) percent of salary, but 

because they followed the binary award model (i.e., many nonawardees are included in the 

average for both teachers and administrators). In those programs, although more than half of 

educators did not win awards, those that did often received large amounts of money ($8,000 per 

teacher and $10,000 per administrator in one grantee). Exhibit 9 shows the proportion of 

participating teachers winning an incentive award in these seven grantees, along with the 

percentages of salary represented by both the average award across all participants and the 

average across only awardees. Across these seven grantees, an average of 22.5 percent of 

teachers won an award. When averaged over all participants, the award was only 1.4 percent of 

an average salary, but for winners, it averaged 6.7 percent. For administrators, an average of 20.7 

percent of administrators won an award in these seven grantees. When their award is averaged 

over all participants, the award was only 0.9 percent of average salary, but for winners, it 

averaged 5.4 percent. 

7

5

3

8

4

2 2

11

4

7

6

2 2

1

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

0–2 2–4 4–6 6–8 8–10 10–12 12+

Number of Grantees

Average Percentage of Salary

Teachers Administrators
25

Exhibit 9. Incentive awards for teachers in seven grantees with largest number 

of nonawardees 

Grantee Percentage of Participants Winning

Percentage of Salary

Across All 

Participants

Across Only 

Awardees

1 6.3 0.8 13.0

2 8.2 0.4 4.8

3 9.6 0.5 5.5

4 19.1 0.5 2.8

5 32.9 2.7 8.3

6 36.3 1.9 5.2

7 44.9 3.2 7.1

Average 22.5 1.4 6.7

Exhibit reads: In Grantee 1, 6.3 percent of TIF project participants earned a performance award. The amount of the 

average award per TIF project participant was 0.8 percent of the average teacher base salary; the amount of the 

average award per TIF awardee was 13.0 percent of the average teacher base salary. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in the case 

of two grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

Within-Grantee Differences in Incentive Award Amounts 

The size of incentive awards varied from project to project, and it often varied substantially 

within projects as well. As discussed above, nine projects created variation within their projects 

by not paying incentive awards to many teachers. However, even in teacher and administrator 

projects in which more than two-thirds of all participants received an incentive award (22 and 

23 projects, respectively), there was still substantial variation. In these projects, the variation 

occurred not between nonawardees and awardees but between awardees receiving small 

incentive awards and those receiving larger incentives. Because nearly everyone won an 

incentive award in these projects, it is particularly necessary to examine the variation in the size 

of the awards within each grantee. The within-grantee variation shows the difference between the 

amount of the incentive award received for high performance as opposed to the award received 

just for participating in the program. This section examines that variation for those 22 grantees’ 

teacher projects, as well as the sources of variation for all 33 TIF projects. 

To analyze each grantee’s incentive awards, we separated all teachers and administrators in 

each grantee into quartiles based on the total dollar value of incentive payout. We then calculated 

the average incentive award amount for each quartile and how that amount was divided (on 

average) among award components. Exhibit 10 shows the average award size for each quartile 

and components for the 22 grantees that awarded additional pay to most teachers.31 The incentive 

award size was substantial for even the lowest quartile of teachers receiving an award, and it was 

quite large for teachers in the top quartile. Expressing these incentive awards as a percentage of 

 

31 These data are available for all grantees in Appendix D. We excluded grantees where most participants did not 

receive an incentive award in this exhibit because including nine “$0” in the average for the first quartile would 

not accurately represent the average incentive awards received by those who received awards. 
26

regionally representative salaries, those in the lowest quartile received an award equal to 

2.7 percent of their base salary while those in the highest quartile received an award that was 

14.3 percent of base salary. Even in the lowest quartile of awards, the average incentive award 

was above the threshold research suggests is required for some incentive effect.32 Among the 

22 grantees that paid more than two-thirds of their teachers, there was a clear difference between 

the highest and lowest payouts, but even at the bottom of the award distribution, the size of the 

incentive awards was fairly substantial. 

Exhibit 10. Average incentive award size by quartile across 22 grantees awarding most 

teachers 

Exhibit Reads: Teachers in the first quartile of total award size for the 22 grantees that gave awards to most teachers 

earned an average award of $1,204. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in the case 

of two grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

The sources of the pay differentiation for educators within TIF grantees (i.e., the reasons 

that one educator received a larger performance award than another) are the key to understanding 

grantees’ TIF projects. The factors that drove whether an incentive award was relatively modest 

or relatively large reflect what grantees value. In other words, they show the attributes of 

educators who command more compensation in the performance pay marketplace. By examining 

pay differentiation within a grantee, it is possible to see what a teacher who wants to earn more 

 

32 This average includes one grantee that gave the average teacher in the lowest quartile a 16.2 percent bonus. 

Outliers like that do not skew the mean though because the median award size for the lower quartile of these 22 

programs was 2.7 percent as well. 

$1,204 

$2,350 

$3,438 

$6,764 

 $-

 $1,000

 $2,000

 $3,000

 $4,000

 $5,000

 $6,000

 $7,000

 $8,000

 $9,000

 $10,000

1st 2nd 3rd 4th

Award Size

Quartile of Total Award Size
27

pay while remaining in a given grantee would be motivated to do by the performance pay 

program.

The analysis began by rank ordering the incentive awards received by all project 

participants (including those who earned an award of $0) within each grantee. The next step was 

to calculate both the average incentive award level for each quartile as well as the value of each 

award component (e.g., student achievement, teacher evaluation score) for each quartile. 

Separating the award payouts by quartile facilitated categorization of grantees based on which 

components led to the range in award amounts.33 These factors were student achievement, 

teacher evaluation, additional roles, hard-to-staff subjects or schools, and multiple factors (for 

grantees in which no one category was the primary determinant of within-grantee variation). 

Two contrasting examples (see Exhibits 11 and 12) illustrate how grantees’ projects varied and 

how that variation was categorized. 

For one of the grantees, the difference in average payout from the first to the fourth 

quartile was approximately $6,000 (see Exhibit 11). This differentiation was based almost solely 

on variation in measured student achievement. As a result, this grantee’s project was categorized 

as “differentiating on student achievement.” 

 

33 Because analysis on the source of incentive award variation applies to all projects (not just those that paid an 

incentive award to most teachers), this analysis was performed on all projects including those that gave incentive 

awards to just a small percentage of teachers. 
28

Exhibit 11. Incentive award amount differentiated by student achievement in one grantee 

Exhibit Reads: Teachers in the first quartile of payouts for this grantee earned an average award of $382, of which 

$379 was for student achievement and $3 was for job attendance (such a small amount that it is invisible on all 

columns until the fourth quartile where it was $74). 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in the case 

of two grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

 $-

 $1,000

 $2,000

 $3,000

 $4,000

 $5,000

 $6,000

 $7,000

 $8,000

 $9,000

 $10,000

1st 2nd 3rd 4th

Award Size 

Quartile of Total Award Size 

Achievement Job Attendance

$382

$1,664 

$3,294 

$6,483 
29

Another grantee paid incentive awards for student achievement gains, teacher evaluation 

scores, and teachers taking on additional roles and responsibilities (see Exhibit 12). This grantee 

had an approximately $5,300 difference in average payout between the first and fourth quartiles. 

The major contributor to differences in the size of the incentive awards across the quartiles was 

not student achievement gains or evaluation scores, for which all participating teachers received 

a similar award. Instead, this grantee differentiated teacher incentive awards on the basis of 

whether or not teachers assumed additional roles.34

 

34 Teachers selected to assume additional roles such as those of a master or mentor teacher were believed to be 

high-performing teachers. Such a performance pay system implies a strategic decision that the most effective 

way to deploy the best teachers is to have them help other teachers improve their performance as opposed to 

solely teaching students. 
30

Exhibit 12. Incentive award amount differentiated by additional roles in another grantee 

Exhibit Reads: Teachers in the first quartile of payouts for this grantee earned an average incentive award of $2,177, 

of which $1,110 was for teacher evaluations, $1,067 was for student achievement, and $0 was for additional roles. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in the case 

of two grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

This example (see Exhibit 12) shows that the quartile variation analysis is not necessarily 

an examination of what components a grantee spends the most money on. While in many cases 

the two overlap, in this example, there is a difference between the components that drive quartile 

variation in award amounts and the components the grantee spends the most money on. In this 

grantee, 72 percent of the overall incentive awards to teachers were paid based on either 

achievement or evaluation, while the remaining 28 percent went to teachers taking on additional 

roles. 35 However, when we compared teachers in the bottom quartile to teachers in the top 

quartile, 83 percent of the difference came from pay for additional roles. The differentiation 

analysis looks at what grantees pay for through the lens of comparing the components that make 

up the average of the highest quartile of payouts and the average of the lowest quartile of 

payouts. In this case a teacher that improves his or her evaluation score from low to high might 

expect an increase in pay of slightly more than $600 ($1,110 to $1,780), but the real driver of a 

large award in this grantee comes from additional roles. 

After completing the quartile variation analysis for teacher incentive awards in all 

31 grantees that provide teacher awards under TIF, we categorized each grantee by the primary 

factor that led to variation within it (see Exhibit 13). To identify the primary factor, we used the 

payout data to first determine the difference in the average incentive award for teachers in the 

 

35 Similar data for all grantees is included in Appendix D along with other data on incentive awards. 

$1,067 $1,351 $1,575 $1,448 

$1,110 

$1,420 

$1,780 $1,647 

$37 

$4,410 

 $-

 $1,000

 $2,000

 $3,000

 $4,000

 $5,000

 $6,000

 $7,000

 $8,000

 $9,000

 $10,000

1st 2nd 3rd 4th

Award Size

Quartile of Total Award Size

Achievement Evaluation Additional Roles
31

highest and lowest quartiles. We then identified which individual award components made up 

that difference. If any individual component made up more than 50 percent of the difference 

between the low and high payouts, that component was classified as the primary36 differentiation 

factor. 

Exhibit 13. Primary factors leading to differentiation in teacher incentive award amounts 

Exhibit reads: Student achievement was the primary factor leading to differentiation of teacher incentive award 

amounts in 15 grantees. 

Note: This exhibit presents data for the 31 grantees that included teachers in their TIF project. 

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data from the 2008 09 school year (or from the 2007 08 school year in the case 

of two grantees) collected during phone interviews conducted in 2010. 

For example, in one grantee, the average teacher in the first quartile of total payouts earned 

an incentive award of $1,091. The average teacher in the top quartile of the same grantee earned 

an average incentive award of $7,484. The difference of $6,393 was driven by three award 

components: student achievement, evaluations, and additional roles. Nineteen percent of the 

difference in incentive award amount came from student achievement, and 18 percent came from 

the evaluation component, but the primary differentiating factor was taking on additional roles, 

which made up 63 percent of the difference. In some grantees, no single component made up 

more than 50 percent of the difference in incentive award size. In those cases, the grantees were 

classified as having multiple differentiation factors.37

 

36 The word “primary” is a critical part of the classification scheme because in many cases there were significant 

secondary or tertiary drivers of award differences. While we used the 50 percent threshold to delineate a primary 

factor, four grantees’ teacher projects with one “primary” factor (that contributed to over 50 percent of the 

differentiation) had a secondary factor that accounted for between 30 and 40 percent of the increase in the 

average incentive award between the low and high quartiles. 

37 In two cases, grantees were classified as having “multiple” differentiation factors because the differences 

between low and high payouts were driven by only two components and both components accounted for about 

half the differentiation. 

15

9

2

5

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

Student Achievement Additional Roles Hard-to-staff School

or Subject

Multiple Categories

Number of Grantees

Award Component
32

Although student achievement was the primary source of differentiation in 15 grantees, in 

just over half the grantees one or more other categories of awards were the primary source of 

differentiation of award amounts. While all these award components met TIF guidelines, they 

represent different implicit theories about how to stimulate improved instructional quality and 

student achievement. Grantees in which student achievement was the primary differentiating 

factor assigned monetary value directly to student test scores. The other grantees’ program 

designs placed greater value on one or more of the following strategies for using compensation 

to support improved outcomes: investing in individuals holding positions designed to enhance 

the skills of other educators (additional roles), redistributing teachers to hard-to-staff teaching 

assignments, or direct measures of teaching skills (teacher evaluation scores). 

One grantee (described in the textbox, “Reforming the Traditional Salary Schedule,” 

below) took the idea of differentiating teacher pay based on performance far beyond other TIF 

grantees. In 2009–10, this grantee began the transition to a teacher salary schedule based 

primarily on performance.38 In this case, the grantee developed and introduced tests of student 

performance in all subjects and grades, aligned the district curriculum to these tests and the state 

assessment, trained all administrators to observe and measure instruction, and provided intensive 

professional development to support teachers to meet the new expectations. 

 

38 The payout data for this particular grantee included in the preceding analysis represents payouts from the 

2008-09 school year based on its original TIF project design. 
33

A similar analysis of administrator incentive award payouts within each grantee showed 

that teacher and administrator projects have one noteworthy difference. For administrators, 

variations in bonus amounts were driven almost entirely by achievement-based components 

(25 grantees). Of the remaining eight sites, three had differentiation driven by evaluation-based 

components, one by additional roles, and four by multiple categories. 

Taken as a whole, these data show that about half of grantees differentiated teacher awards 

primarily by student achievement, a key proxy for the variation in teacher quality. However, 

many other grantees differentiated pay on the basis of other factors, most frequently teachers 

assuming additional roles. 

Reforming the Traditional Salary Schedule 

Between the 2009–10 and 2010–11 school years, one grantee made changes that made its pay for 

performance program markedly different from all the other teacher-focused programs. It abolished 

the old salary schedule and required principals to place all their teachers into performance bands. 

Every teacher received a guarantee that he or she would never make less than the salary received 

in 2009–10. 

This new system represents a permanent change to the teacher salary schedule and will be based 

on the principal's observation (50 percent) and on student achievement data from various sources 

(50 percent). This new pay system has important implications for all three areas of payout analysis 

presented in this section of the report: 

Percentage of Participants Winning an Award 

A district panel determined that of the 522 returning teachers, 129 would receive no pay raise and 

60 were “distinguished.” 

Average Incentive Award Payment 

When the new salary was set, the average teacher received a permanent pay raise of $4,330 or 

10.7 percent of their average salary. Some distinguished teachers who had been paid much less 

than colleagues with more seniority before the new plan received raises of more than $20,000 that 

will be phased in over the next few years. 

Within-Grantee Differences in Award Amount 

The program increased the range of the incentive awards and established awards based on 

teacher evaluation scores and student achievement. Some additional leadership activities that 

teachers must master in order to reach the highest scales of the salary schedule also will be 

measured. However, in contrast to some pay for performance programs that explicitly pay teachers 

for taking on roles like mentoring or leading committees, in this program, teachers must satisfy that 

requirement in addition to leading their students to large gains to receive an award.
34
35

Implementation Findings 

Performance pay is designed to improve educator quality by motivating educators to teach 

or lead more effectively, increasing the recruitment and retention of the most effective educators, 

and incentivizing the least effective educators to leave. “Successful” implementation, therefore, 

must position a project to motivate educators to achieve the desired outcomes. Given the 

centrality of motivation, the first topic considered is educators’ perceptions of program fairness 

because research (cited below) indicates that educator motivation is negatively impacted if they 

do not believe the performance pay program is fair. Additionally, if a program were successfully 

implemented, educators would understand the program, report that the program spurred 

collaboration and healthy competition, and be motivated by the program. This chapter discusses 

these issues in turn. The chapter closes with a discussion of two aspects of project 

implementation—district and school leadership and sustainability—which influenced the quality 

of implementation and the likelihood that performance pay would continue after the conclusion 

of the TIF grant. 

Perceived Fairness of Performance Pay

The purpose of performance pay is to use compensation as a lever to motivate educators to 

achieve desired outcomes. Prior research on educator performance pay suggests that if educators 

believe the program is unfair—either in their perceptions of project design or award 

calculations—motivation to achieve program goals is negatively impacted (McCaffrey, Han and 

Lockwood 2009; Kelley and Finnigan 2003; Kelley, Odden, Milanowski and Heneman 2000). 

As a result, a core goal of program implementation is to convince educators that the performance 

pay program is “fair” so that it can motivate them to achieve program goals. 

The primary source of data on implementation is interviews with project staff, state and 

district leaders, educators, and other stakeholders, such as union members and school board 

members, conducted during phone interviews and the first round of site visits. These interviews 

suggested that the degree to which teachers’ perceived performance pay to be fair largely 

determined their support of the new compensation system. Interview data suggest that educators 

believed their performance pay program was “fair” if they believed that they could affect their 

compensation. When educators assessed whether they could affect their compensation under 

TIF, they tended to focus on two project features: (1) incentive awards for teachers in untested 

grades and subjects and (2) performance measures used to determine incentive awards. In 

addition, educators felt that the performance pay program was fair if they believed their resulting 

compensation was consistent with their performance. The following subsections describe these 

three aspects of grantee projects and their effect on perceptions of fairness and ultimately 

educator motivation to achieve certain outcomes. 

Incentive Awards for Teachers in Untested Grades 

When teachers discussed fairness in their interviews with the researchers, how the various 

TIF projects dealt with the issue of incentive awards for teachers in untested subjects and grades 

was reported as a major concern. While 30 grantees used standardized tests as one measure of 

teacher performance, standardized tests were typically not administered in the early primary 

grades, not administered frequently (or at all, depending on the subject) in subjects other than 
36

mathematics and language arts, and typically covered only a portion of grades and classes in 

middle and high schools. 

When grantees used standardized tests of student achievement as the basis for teacher-level 

performance awards (12 grantees), they were open to criticism for how their system treated 

teachers of untested subjects. If those teachers were excluded entirely from earning incentive 

awards based on student performance (two grantees) or could earn a lower maximum incentive 

award than their colleagues who taught tested subjects (10 grantees), the fairness of the 

performance pay project was criticized because these teachers did not have an equal opportunity 

(compared with peers in tested subjects) to positively affect their compensation through high 

performance. As one teacher who taught an untested subject reported, “You are punishing me for 

something over which I have no control.” On the other hand, educators in tested subjects 

sometimes defended the fact that they were eligible for a higher bonus because of the increased 

pressure associated with teaching a tested subject. Even if the restriction in eligibility were seen 

as fair (which, based on educator interviews, it typically was not), it reduced the proportion of 

teachers in a given school who could participate in performance pay or the amount some teachers 

could earn, thus reducing the potential motivation generated by the performance pay project. 

Eleven grantees pursued other strategies for giving teachers incentive awards for student 

performance while including teachers of untested subjects. One way to include all teachers in 

performance pay while using measures based on standardized tests is to measure student 

performance at the school level. Twenty-seven grantees included school-level student 

performance awards in their teacher performance pay project (including six grantees that only 

made incentive awards based on school-level student performance and 21 grantees that provided

teacher- and school-level awards).39 Most teachers did not have concerns about the fairness of 

schoolwide incentive awards even though such awards are vulnerable to the problem of “free 

riders.”40 Two less common solutions to allowing teachers in untested subjects to participate in 

teacher-level student performance measures involved developing measures of student 

achievement for every grade and subject or letting teachers determine their own goals for student 

learning based on the measure of their choice. Grantees using these strategies faced questions 

about the validity and reliability of the tests and the comparability of teacher-developed goals. 

Performance Measures 

The type of performance measures projects used to determine incentive awards was the 

second feature that educators reported raised concerns about fairness. As described earlier, 

grantees based performance awards on a wide range of measures. Exhibit 14 summarizes the 

strengths and weaknesses of these measures. 

 

39

 The literature is inconclusive as to whether school-level or individual-level awards are more effective in 

education. There are theoretical justifications as well as empirical support for paying at either level (Ahn and 

Vigdor 2010; Neal 2009; Marulidaran and Sundararaman 2006). The point of this section, however, is not to 

debate the pros and cons of this decision writ large but rather to discuss how teachers perceive the fairness of 

their performance pay projects because that perception is one of the aspects of performance pay projects related 

to how much the performance pay project will be likely to motivate teachers. 

40 Free riders are individuals who receive a group award without putting forth equal effort to earn it. They thus 

pose a challenge to the fairness of group awards. 
37

Exhibit 14. Educator-reported perceptions of measures based on student achievement 

Measure Strengths Weaknesses

Student achievement status Measure is well known by 

teachers

Teachers with the lowest

performing students have low 

chances of achieving awards 

Student growth Teachers with low-performing 

students can achieve

May be more difficult for teachers 

of high-achieving students to 

achieve given ceiling effects

VAM Teachers with low-performing 

students can achieve

Difficult to understand; some 

model specifications may be 

biased or unreliable*

District-developed assessments Teacher participation in the 

process

Lack the psychometric rigor of 

standardized tests

Teacher-developed metrics Customized around each 

teacher’s goals

Insufficient standardization and 

monitoring to prevent cheating

Note: Value-added models refer to a range of ways to statistically estimate the effects of educators on student 

achievement. Different types of VAM differ in terms of validity and reliability. For a discussion of variation among 

different VAM models, see McCaffrey, Han and Lockwood (2009). 

Through interviews, we learned that teachers’ beliefs about the fairness of the performance 

measures were based on their understanding of the measures. When measures were transparent, 

teachers understood them, and their perceptions were closely aligned with the measures’ 

technical strengths and weaknesses. When measures were more complicated and had not been 

sufficiently explained to teachers, confusion and allegations of unfairness were more commonly 

reported. Two measures (teacher-developed metrics and VAMs) aroused more concerns among 

educators about fairness than other measures. 

Teacher-Developed Metrics 

Five grantees made incentive awards to teachers based in part on teacher-developed 

metrics. For this type of incentive award, educators typically needed to have a supervisor 

approve their goals to ensure that they were relevant and challenging. Despite this safeguard, 

educators voiced numerous concerns about whether such measures could ever be implemented 

fairly. As one teacher commented, “I haven’t read anyone else’s [goals]. But if you let somebody 

write their own objective and set their own standard of measure and you’re tying money to it, 

they’re going to stack the decks in their favor.” In addition to concerns about various forms of 

cheating or “gaming” the system, both teachers and administrators pointed out the challenge that 

approving goals proved for administrators. A high school administrator could, hypothetically, be 

asked to confirm that the student learning goals set by teachers of AP Physics, dance, and a 

vocational class all met similar standards for rigor. Overall, educators’ concerns about the 

fairness of this type of measure are consistent with the technical concerns. 

Value-Added and Growth Measures 

The use of VAMs to estimate teacher quality has received a lot of attention among both 

scholars and the media in recent years. Some researchers have emphasized the potential of 

VAMs, noting that VAMs encompass a range of statistical model types that are at the cutting 
38

edge for isolating the contributions of teachers or schools to student performance on standardized 

tests relative to other contributing factors (Glazerman et al. 2010). However, researchers have 

also raised concerns about noise in the estimates (Schochet and Chiang 2010), year-to-year test 

score instability (Sass 2008), nonrandom student assignments (Baker et al. 2010), and a host of 

other issues (Newton et al. 2010; National Research Council and the National Academy of 

Sciences 2010). Even proponents recommend VAM only as one of multiple measures of teacher 

effectiveness for important decisions. As one group of researchers concluded: 

We do not advocate using value added measures alone when making decisions 

about hiring, firing, tenure, compensation, placement, or developing teachers, 

but surely value added information ought to be in the mix given the empirical 

evidence that it predicts more about what students will learn from the teachers 

to which they are assigned than any other source of information. 

(Glazerman et al. 2010) 

VAMs and growth measures consistently generated the most comments about fairness.41

Some educators reported that using growth or VAMs was substantially fairer than using status 

measures because teachers with low-performing students had a realistic chance of earning an 

incentive award. One comment came from a high school teacher in a grantee that used a student 

achievement status measure the first year of TIF and then switched to a VAM: 

Everyone understands the difference between growth and attainment. Everyone 

gets that, even if you’re not totally clear about how the state got your growth 

total .... 30 percent of our kids are at a fifth grade [level]. Everyone was 

frustrated [when incentive awards were based on student achievement status] 

because you’re never going to get them to tenth grade. They came in so low 

you just can’t do that.... When we went to the growth model, and it was, 

‘Here’s where they were, how far did we move them?’ It was like, ‘I am 

working; they are moving....’ People do recognize they are getting paid out for 

working hard to help the kids.... I think if we were just paying on attainment, 

teachers would say, ‘Just forget it.’ 

Even though a key purpose of these measures is to level the playing field by including 

prior achievement (and sometimes other factors) in setting the expectation for student 

achievement, educators often believed the measures were unfairly biased toward some educators 

over others.42 In terms of educators’ beliefs about the potential strengths and weaknesses of 

 

41 TIF educators consistently failed to differentiate between growth and VAM measures in describing how their 

performance was assessed (e.g., stating that awards were given on the basis of how much student achievement 

improved during a year when in fact their project in some way compared annual growth to an expected growth 

trajectory) showing that, with a few exceptions, they did not have a good conceptual understanding of VAMs. As 

a result of this comingling, educators raised the same technical concerns about both types of measures, although 

their responses showed additional concerns about the transparency of VAMs. Teachers did not raise all the 

experts’ technical concerns about the fairness of these measures (e.g., that teacher-level VAM measures are more 

reliable for teachers at the extremes of the distribution than those nearer the center of the distribution), although 

some project leaders familiar with the calculations were quite precise in describing technical strengths and 

concerns of their VAM or growth measures. 

42 It is outside the scope of this study to evaluate the specific methods used to calculate growth and VAM measures 

in each grantee in order to assess the merits of these concerns. 
39

VAMs in producing fair measures of educator quality, these statements were consistent with 

those found in the research community (McCaffrey, Han and Lockwood 2009). 

Additionally, however, VAM measures raised educator concerns about fairness that were 

not associated with other performance measures and were not fully attributable to the measures’ 

technical properties. Most commonly reported were comments that indicated general distrust and 

misunderstanding of complicated statistical formulas. In one grantee, for example, a union leader 

described the calculations as being done by a “mad scientist.” Many teachers interviewed in that 

grantee did not have faith in the calculations, which they viewed as mysterious, and cited ways 

they believed the calculations were biased against them. One teacher explained her perceptions 

of VAM, and how when she did not receive an award she dismissed the VAM model as an unfair 

measure rather than perceiving it as an accurate measure of deficiencies in her instruction: 

That [measure] is so murky.... The [teacher-level VAM] is supposed to be a 

way to measure the student growth. They calculate it by projected 

measurements—that they decide—the kids should grow the amount.... I’m not 

comfortable with it at all. It’s not really clear. They use a lot of terminology 

that we’re not used to. It’s not in laymen’s terms.... They try to explain it 

online and there are sessions you can go to. It still doesn’t make sense to a lot 

of people.... I don’t know. I consider myself a wonderful teacher. I’m not the 

best; I’m not the worst.... Last time [I got my value added information], many 

students did not reach the growth targets necessary for me to receive an award. 

So that was unfair to me. 

While one could counter that this comment is merely an example of the teacher’s human 

instinct to rationalize her situation, VAM measures were more prone to this type of 

rationalization than other measures because they were not transparent to teachers. Absent 

extensive communication and education by the grantee, VAM was not well understood by 

teachers or principals and was vulnerable to accusations that the calculations were somehow 

unfair. This was problematic for grantee implementation in that failure to receive an incentive 

award could be rationalized away as a problem with the calculation of an unfair measure, rather 

than serving as a motivator to improve instructional quality. 

Accurate and Appropriate Incentive Award Payments 

The third major aspect of grantee projects that teachers reported as a concern was about 

fairness as it related to the accuracy and appropriateness of incentive award payments. Grantees’ 

ability to calculate and distribute incentive award payments without error is a fundamental data 

capacity issue that affected the extent to which educators believed their performance pay project 

was fair. Grantees entered TIF aware, to some extent, of the fact that their data capacity might be 

stretched by project implementation. Analysis of TIF proposals and early reporting documents 

showed that six grantees planned to update their data systems to meet the needs of their TIF 

program, and 12 grantees were developing whole new data systems with funding from TIF and 

other sources (Humphrey et al. 2009). Grantees’ efforts have led to improvement of capacity in a 

wide variety of areas. Yet perhaps given the scope of the task, challenges persist for some 

grantees. 

In one grantee, teachers reported that the district’s procedures for establishing eligibility 

were prone to error. Many teachers reportedly believed they had opted in and were eligible to 

receive incentive awards only to find out later that the system had no record of their 
40

participation. One teacher, whose students reportedly reached the levels of performance that 

would have qualified her for a bonus and who believed she had opted in, described her feelings 

when she found that the data system had no record of her participation in the project and that she 

would not be getting an incentive award: 

You offer us the opportunity to earn more money if you do ABCD.... We did 

ABCD, but you didn’t hold up your end. Don’t dangle a carrot and then [not 

pay the award].... I don’t think that’s ethical.... 

In this grantee, the perception that data system problems led to teachers being unfairly excluded 

from the performance pay project prompted the union to file appeals and formal grievances on 

behalf of teachers. In the school in which the teacher quoted above taught, other teachers 

appeared to be aware of these problems, which negatively colored their perception of the 

project’s fairness.

Other grantees made errors in payouts, which were also reportedly quite damaging to 

participants’ perceptions of the program. For example, one grantee received national media 

attention for mailing teachers incorrect bonus checks. In another, principals reported to 

researchers that the incentive award checks they were sent for teachers did not match information 

they were provided about the amount of the award each teacher would receive. A project leader 

in another grantee, whose records supporting incentive award calculations were being maintained 

in manila folders, reported that approximately 10 percent of participants appealed the amount of 

their award during the initial round of payouts. Because of the inadequacies of their data 

systems, the grantee was unable to contest any teacher’s claim, resulting in additional incentive 

award payments that might or might not have been warranted. 

Calculations of VAMs presented a special data capacity challenge for grantees because 

they require a high-capacity data system to accurately link students to their teachers over time. 

Whereas some grantees that used a growth or VAM model did the calculations internally, others 

that lacked the internal data capacity sent data out to experts for calculation. Neither way seemed 

inherently preferable. In a grantee doing its own calculations, teachers who were interviewed 

raised doubts about the accuracy of the district’s calculations. On the other hand, several project 

leaders complained in interviews that if an outside expert conducted the calculations, even those 

experts were unable to verify accuracy. In both cases, there were concerns about the fairness of 

the incentive award calculations. As a general safeguard, several grantees that contracted out 

calculations of the measures used to determine performance pay awards conducted their own 

analyses on the raw data to confirm that there was a high correlation between the results they 

would expect and those received from outside contractors. In all known cases, this exercise 

reportedly bolstered project leaders’ confidence that the calculations were fair. Educators, 

though, seemed unaware of concerns of project leaders’ in grantees that had contracted with 

outside vendors for calculations or corroboration processes. 

Overall, it appears that grantees with initial limitations in their data capacity made 

improvements as they implemented their performance pay projects. These improvements were 

critical for project implementation. Based on educator reports, when interviewees perceived that 

the basic procedures for identifying and paying award recipients were flawed, the connection 

between educator work toward project criteria and the resulting incentive award was eliminated, 

reducing the potential motivation of performance pay. 
41

Perceived Fairness and Support for Compensation Reform 

Few educators interviewed stated that they were inherently opposed to performance pay as 

an idea. Many did, however, raise the various concerns discussed above about the particular 

measures on which their performance pay was based. But even within grantees, there was 

variation in perception of fairness, leading researchers to consider not just the overall perceived 

fairness of project design and implementation but also whether there were any patterns that 

might explain which teachers were more or less likely to believe that a project was “fair.” 

The educator surveys currently under way will provide more conclusive data on the 

correlation between teacher characteristics and beliefs, but the interviews suggest two hypotheses 

to be examined with forthcoming survey data. First, educators newer to the profession were more 

likely than veterans to believe that performance pay was fair. In one grantee, for example, a 

newer teacher reported, “Younger teachers bought in very easily. For us, it just seemed like a 

benefit. We could be compensated for our production.” Some veterans, on the other hand, 

complained about the rigidity of teaching under the new system, and others had reportedly left 

the district entirely. The second hypothesis is that those whose compensation increased because 

of performance pay were likely to believe that their project was fair. 

These hypotheses are related because in the traditional teacher salary schedule, a major 

determinant of compensation is years of experience. As a result of newer teachers’ lower base 

salary, performance bonuses offer a proportionately higher increase in compensation for newer 

teachers compared with veterans. Interviews with both veteran and novice teachers suggested 

that veterans were sometimes as supportive of their performance pay project as novices (and 

novices sometimes equally opposed as veterans) based on whether they believed their 

compensation would increase under the performance pay project. 

Looking across all the educator comments about fairness, no one measure is perceived by 

educators as always fair, yet every measure that TIF grantees are using is viewed as having 

strengths. Grantees’ implementation of performance pay, in terms of how projects addressed the 

issue of teachers in untested grades and subjects, which performance measures they employed, 

and the perceived accuracy of incentive awards all influenced educator perceptions about the 

fairness of performance pay. 

Using Communication to Build Educator Understanding of Performance Pay 

Technical assistance and prior research on performance pay ensured that all grantees knew 

they needed educator buy-in to successfully implement TIF. Reports from interviews with 

teachers and administrators suggest that grantees tended to have greater success building buy-in 

when they found ways to give educators a sense that they could help shape the project. Yet for 

many grantees, communication with educators was a very difficult part of implementation. There 

were notable differences in the intensity of grantees’ efforts and the resulting educators’ 

perceptions. Some grantees effectively used their initial and ongoing planning processes to 

establish two-way communication between project leaders and educators about their 

performance pay project. Others effectively communicated by offering educators a way to get 

answers to their own individual questions in addition to providing project information through 

more centralized communications strategies. Researchers’ interviews with educators suggest that 

when educators understood the project and when they believed that their feedback was taken into 

consideration in designing and revising it, they were more likely to believe their performance 

pay plan was fair. 
42

Planning Processes 

Regardless of where grantees began, their first opportunity to inform educators about the 

performance pay project was during the development of their TIF grant application. Unions, 

teachers, and school leaders were included in roughly two-thirds of project designs but typically 

not until after the decision to apply was made or in some cases after the grant had been won. The 

nature of involvement in the proposal preparation varied as well. In many cases, most of the 

major decisions about the project were made by the handful of people involved in writing the 

proposal. Even if educators had a seat on a planning committee, they often did not get to make 

key decisions. As one principal who served on a planning committee explained, “Downtown 

made all the decisions, which was very frustrating. It was a waste of time to get our input and not 

use it.” Another principal in the same grantee who participated in the planning concurred that in 

spite of their presence on the planning committee, those designing the project did not consider 

issues important to principals. 

In another grantee, however, the district used focus groups to gain educators’ feedback as it 

initiated reform of the entire salary structure through an ongoing planning process. One teacher 

reported attending a focus group meeting, hearing many issues discussed, and then seeing the 

outcomes of that meeting as changes were implemented in ways that were responsive to educator 

input: 

I was able to be part of the...focus group a couple times last year. You heard a 

lot of questions and answers, and we saw a lot of things change and shift and 

ideas shift.... At times it was a little messy with...people going, “What is this 

going to be?” and throwing rumors left and right.... [But] there were 

opportunities to learn more, and you saw a lot of the rumors dispelled as you 

saw changes. 

In this case, important decisions about project design and implementation were made with 

educator input through the focus group planning structure. For example, educators convinced 

project leaders that when the new evaluation system was rolled out, educators’ salaries should 

not be reduced in the first year of implementation, even if the evaluation results showed that an

educator was being paid more than was merited by his or her performance in the new system. 

This planning process reportedly not only helped educators learn about the performance pay 

project but also built their trust in the resulting design because they could see how their 

communications with project leaders were considered. 

Finally, grantees varied in how long their planning processes lasted and whether they 

provided teachers enough time to understand and buy in to the project. One grantee operating in 

a charter school network put all components of Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in place, 

aside from performance pay, during the first year of project implementation. When new schools 

joined the network, they had their own year of TAP without pay attached to performance 

measures before attaching financial stakes to the results. One TAP principal explained why she 

believed it was important for schools to spend an entire year doing a dry run of TAP before 

adding performance pay into their project: 

That first year it was really about getting to know TAP. It’s a critical piece.... 

It’s very difficult to do [this project] without the pre-TAP year because you are 

jumping in to change the culture of the school. Because that is really what TAP 

will do if you do it right. But you are giving performance pay [as well], which 
43

is a whole different [layer]. So if you don’t have time to get the culture piece 

right [first]...it can create toxicity in your culture. 

The data do not enable a precise count of the number of grantees that used some type of 

extensive planning process to build participant understanding of and comfort with their 

performance pay project. However, it seems that few successfully used planning processes to 

build a broad base of educator support for their performance pay project. Nonetheless, the 

examples suggest how planning processes could fulfill this function. 

Communication Processes 

Grantees used a range of formal mechanisms for communicating with educators, with 

varying levels of customization for individual schools. Communication strategies included

newsletters, websites, formal presentations, and information about how to contact someone to 

answer questions. Implementation of these strategies varied, as did their reported success in 

building educator understanding and buy-in. 

For example, one district relied mostly on a few short presentations made in several 

centralized locations throughout a large urban district and a website to give teachers information 

about the project. Project leaders reported that principals played a vital role in providing 

information to teachers in each school, but interviewed principals were not aware that they were 

expected to fill this role. When questions and concerns arose during the most recent round of 

payouts, the voicemail of the district employee responsible for answering educators’ questions 

was too full to accept any new messages. 

Another large district, which included VAM models among its measures, took a much 

more proactive approach to communication than most grantees. The approach is worth 

highlighting because the communication seemed to have generally alleviated the widespread 

suspicion of VAM models seen in other grantees stemming from poor understanding of the 

calculation methods. (Some concerns remained, but they could generally be classified as similar 

to experts’ technical questions about using VAMs for performance pay.) At the start of every 

year, the district made a presentation on TIF on the campus of each participating school. The 

district leadership reported that the most important communication strategy, however, was 

simply personal contact and outreach by the entire staff. One key member of the project 

implementation team described the team’s philosophy and how the members did their job: 

We do what [teachers] want us to do.... It was clear that our teachers didn’t 

want to leave their buildings, so now the trainings are in the buildings.... 

[Teachers] email us and, if I’m at my computer, I drop everything and answer 

their email. That’s my policy. We all answer everything within 24 hours. The 

other day I had a teacher call me and say she was having trouble with the 

[software used for the performance pay project]. I said, “Well, I’ll come out.” 

And the teacher said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “No, seriously, if you 

can’t describe what the problem is, let me come out and see. I’m sure you’re 

not the only one having the issue, so now the next time someone calls I’ll be 

able to help.” 

Researchers found evidence of this intensive and personalized communication when 

walking through this grantee’s schools with project staff members. Teachers knew staff members 

by name, and many spontaneous conversations occurred referring to previous communication 
44

between teachers and the staff members about their performance pay project. The confusion 

prevalent among educators in many grantees about VAM measures and the resulting distrust in 

“mad scientists” calculating VAM scores was uncommon here. In contrast, the district official 

charged with calculating the VAM scores was affectionately referred to as the “data guru.” The 

extensive outreach to teachers had helped them understand the basics of the VAM model and 

built their trust in the TIF project. While educators had many questions and concerns about VAM 

measures, educators did not report that these concerns undermined the project. The 

communication efforts in this grantee were atypical among grantees and could be very 

instructive for others. 

A more common approach to ensuring that teachers had easily accessible and customized 

access to information about the TIF project was to include it as part of master or mentor 

teachers’ role. For example, an area of some performance pay projects that might be more 

difficult for teachers to understand is the performance measures used. In projects that use TAP, 

regular interactions about instruction among classroom and mentor teachers served both to 

support teachers’ improvements in practice and to communicate about the measures by which 

that practice would be measured. 

According to TIF project leaders, in general, communication was among the greatest 

challenges for implementation. It was not uncommon to hear project leaders assert that educators 

paid little attention to attempts to communicate about the project before they received their first 

incentive award payments. At that point, if educators received a lower amount than they had 

anticipated, they sought communication from the grantee but only after they questioned the 

fairness of their performance award. 

None of the planning or communications strategies described above were effective on their 

own, and most were used in combination with other strategies. Based on interviews, it is clear 

that few grantees, especially if the performance pay project had any degree of complexity, were 

able to establish buy-in without intensive effort. Those grantees created a bidirectional flow of 

information and provided educators with avenues to individually access project leaders who 

could address their questions and concerns. When these efforts succeeded, educators believed 

they understood the project and also believed that the leaders designing and implementing it

would respond to educator concerns. As a result, they were more likely to believe that their 

performance pay project was relatively fair overall, even when they had questions or concerns 

about particular processes or measures. 

Collaboration and Competition 

Research on collaboration and competition has long posited that competition can create a 

negative dynamic when individuals believe that the only way they can achieve their goal is for 

their colleagues to fail (Deutsch 1949, 1962). Thus, critics of performance pay sometimes argue 

that it discourages teamwork and harms social cohesion in the schools (Miner 2011). TIF 

grantees’ performance pay projects had some features designed to promote collaboration while 

other features had the potential to foster competition. Literature on competition and motivation 

among educators has little on potentially healthy forms of competition. Educator reports, 

however, suggest that some grantee projects may be inciting a positive form of competition in 

which educators hold themselves and their colleagues accountable for meeting goals, thus 

competing against their own prior performance. Overall, while respondents varied in their 

assessments of whether their performance pay projects had a positive or a negative effect on 
45

collegial relations, reports that TIF promoted collaboration outnumbered reports of TIF-related 

negative competition.43 We turn first to collaboration, then healthy competition, and finally 

competition. 

Educator Collaboration 

As a strategy for improving teacher quality, many grantees included features in their TIF 

project that required teacher collaboration. In some cases, incentive awards based on the 

performance of the entire school were used to promote collaboration. The expectation was these 

schoolwide incentive awards would motivate teachers to coordinate instruction or support the 

improvement of new or struggling teachers. However, the teachers we interviewed rarely 

attributed increases in collaboration to schoolwide incentive awards. Instead, the use of rubrics 

designed to measure effective teaching, the use of master and mentor teachers as instructional 

coaches, and the introduction of dedicated time for collective professional development 

reportedly facilitated collaboration. 

Most TIF projects employed one or more of these strategies. The projects that adopted the 

Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) employed all three strategies. TAP is profiled below. 

The TAP Program

The TAP model’s use of master and mentor teachers is central to its school improvement strategy. While 

mentor teachers were typically released for one hour of the day, master teachers were fully released from 

their regular teaching duties. Together they were charged with a variety of responsibilities, including: 

Organizing and leading weekly professional development meetings of small groups of teachers

Observing and rating teachers using the TAP rubric

Developing new strategies for teaching and piloting them in their colleagues’ classrooms

Assisting individual teachers in improving specific aspects of their teaching

Collaborating with the principal, assistant principal, and mentor teacher to lead the school 

improvement efforts

Other duties as needed (e.g., filling in as substitute teachers, attending outside meetings).

Master and mentor teachers usually had to apply for these positions and were selected on the basis of a 

written application, an interview, and classroom observations. The use of master and mentor teachers to 

evaluate their peers is an important feature of the TAP model not found in other TIF grantee projects. 

While the core work of master or mentor teachers was to facilitate collaboration around instruction, their 

authority to both support and evaluate their colleagues could be a powerful school improvement strategy. 

Interviews suggest that when they fulfilled this role well, master and mentor teachers had the potential to 

improve the professional culture in schools and to increase the intrinsic rewards teachers received from 

their work. 

 

43

 The sampling for interviews does not permit tests of the generalizability of findings; survey data will be used to 

test hypotheses (such as the hypothesis that more educators report that TIF promotes collaboration than report 

that it generates negative competition) for the final implementation report. 
46

Educators gave both positive and negative reports about the TAP model. In some grantees, 

both principals and teachers reported that it provided an opportunity for deep conversations 

about student learning and instructional improvement. 

When principals employed master and mentor teachers as partners in overall school 

improvement efforts, the TAP model helped build a teacher support system that fostered 

collaboration. As one principal explained the value of the master and mentor teachers in her 

school, “There are four teachers in the cluster who are brand new to TAP.... They appreciate the 

fact that they have master and mentor teachers who want to be there and give them a hand.” In 

fact, in many interviews with educators in TAP schools, researchers found that the contributions 

of the master and mentor teachers dominated the educators’ perspectives of the performance pay 

project. 

The TAP model proved difficult to implement with fidelity if master and mentor teachers 

were seen as ineffective. For example, in one grantee when teachers received performance pay 

for attending collaborative meetings, one teacher reported, “I went to [the collaborative] meeting. 

I really didn’t do anything but sign my name, and I got a check.” In contrast, in schools that 

reported success implementing the TAP model, the meetings provided an opportunity to 

collaborate on developing and implementing a shared vision of high-quality instruction. The 

TAP model was also difficult to implement with fidelity if the principal did not support it, as in 

one school in which the principal told her teachers that TAP representatives were “playing 

favorites.” 

Healthy Competition 

While concerns about negative competition in performance pay are well-known, less has 

been written about the way performance pay could spur healthy competition. By “healthy 

competition,” we mean educators individually or collectively competing to exceed their own past 

performance. Reports of healthy competition centered on differentiating levels of performance, 

giving educators a target for professional growth, providing extrinsic rewards for improvement, 

and offering supports to change. Some principals reported that they used their TIF project to 

stimulate healthy competition. One principal described holding a staff meeting at the start of the 

third year of the TIF project after her school had won a second-tier incentive award for its 

performance last year: 

Once the teachers receive that incentive, they want to do it again... [But] you 

have to keep it in front of them. “This year we’re going for [the top award] and 

we’re going to go with science [the focus of their improvement plan] to get 

that.” 

Educators mentioned aspects of healthy competition for schoolwide awards more frequently than 

for teacher-level incentive awards. Nonetheless, some educators in grantees with both teacherlevel and school-level incentive awards mentioned that their TIF project inspired healthy 

competition for them personally. 

Educator Competition 

In contrast to project designs that increase collaboration, some features of TIF projects 

reportedly had the potential to pit educators against each other to earn incentive awards. We use 

the term “tournaments” to describe 15 grantees’ calculations of incentive awards. A tournament 
47

can be established in two ways: first, if grantees limited the number of winners by paying only 

the top portion of educators (e.g., paying a performance award based on teacher-level VAMs to 

the top 30 percent of teachers); second, if grantees limited the total payout regardless of how 

many teachers qualified. This second format has the potential unintended consequence of 

encouraging teachers to hope there are fewer winners to share the pool with. The TAP model fits 

into the latter categorization, setting aside a certain amount per teacher for award payouts. Under 

that plan, if more teachers met higher performance thresholds, the amount of their individual 

bonuses declined. The other national model, EPIC, is an example of the former category because 

it limited the number of schools that could win each award. 

Tournaments are attractive from a budgetary perspective because their costs are known in 

advance. As a district leader in one grantee explained, a performance pay project in which 

everyone could win the maximum for every award component “is most appealing on a number of 

fronts. But how do you model that? We could bankrupt our system really quickly if we set it and 

then everybody starts getting it.” Accurately budgeting for performance pay is more 

straightforward with a tournament model than a model in which an unknown number of 

individuals could win incentive awards of fixed size. 

Despite the potential for tournaments to increase competition, educators did not report 

having strong concerns about whether or not their performance pay project was a tournament. 

Other aspects of projects, including perceived flaws in measures, data capacity deficits, and the 

supports provided for improvement, dominated educators’ comments on their project, even in 

grantees implementing tournaments. However, a few reports of competition attributed to 

performance pay emerged. 

In one grantee, principals could receive incentive awards for multiple measures but 

competed directly against each other for several components when only the top performers won 

awards. One principal reported that she perceived the project as competitive and described a 

reduced willingness to share best practices under a system in which she needed to outperform 

other schools: 

[Our school staff is] supposed to look at strategies and provide evidence, and 

I’m supposed to outperform other middle schools.... [But] I have to show 

middle school teachers [from other schools] next month what [we’re] doing in 

math because [our school is] showing growth, but I need to outperform them....

Why do we have to share our playbooks? 

Her comment highlights the potential tension between stimulating competition between 

schools to encourage them to strive for higher scores and promoting collaboration in pursuit of 

the common goal of raising the achievement of all students. However, this principal’s concern 

was an exception among administrators in the grantees in which researchers conducted site visits. 

In another grantee whose teachers and administrators in the higher deciles of the VAM 

rankingsreceived incentive awards, no educator interviewed reported any adverse effects of 

competition. A union representative, when asked explicitly about whether the project led to 

competition among educators, noted that there were rumors of “unsavory practices” in some 

schools, but researchers were unable to substantiate that claim. In projects implementing TAP in 

particular, when the pool for incentive awards was split among those who met certain 

performance metrics, educators generally did not mention the performance pay aspects of the 

model unless asked about it directly. Even though interviews suggested that some educators, 
48

mostly those whose incentive award payments declined from one year to the next as more of 

their colleagues attained awards, were aware of the tournament nature, without exception 

educators interviewed believed TAP promoted collaboration more than competition. 

A final example connects two implementation issues discussed previously—perceptions of 

the fairness of measures and the importance of successful communication—to show how project 

implementation can influence educators’ views about competition at least as much as project 

design. In one grantee, the largest incentive award component was paid on the basis of a statecalculated measure of schoolwide growth. All teachers in schools that exceeded the 50th 

percentile on the state’s measure received up to a $3,000 incentive award. The project design 

allowed for all teachers in all schools to receive this incentive award in any given year. 

Objectively, the only competition in this project was between schools in this district and schools 

across the state; hypothetically, the project could encourage schools in the district to strive for 

improvement together. Yet educators in the district did not understand how the growth measure 

was calculated, and many (especially in one school that had not won) believed the measure was 

biased. As a result, the project director reported that they perceived this project as spurring 

negative competition among schools in the district because some schools had won the incentive 

award more often than others. 

Objectively, this grantee’s project did not appear likely to generate competition. The 

competitive dynamic seemed to be created by the project’s implementation challenges and the 

context of a small community in which everyone knew who won and who had not. Researchers 

did not hear of schoolwide incentive awards creating competition among schools in other 

grantees, even in those schools that actually did compete against each other for a fixed number of 

incentive awards. Next, we look more closely at participants’ motivation. 

Motivation for Improvement 

Businesses and other organizations outside education adopted performance pay systems 

long before the TIF program began, and this previous experience with performance pay has been 

used to both support and oppose compensation reform in education.44 The core argument in 

support of performance pay is that the extrinsic rewards (pay increases) in education currently 

are not aligned with educator quality; performance pay would, in theory, provide extrinsic 

rewards for desired outcomes (Podgursky and Springer 2007; Adams et al. 2009). In TIF 

performance pay projects, rewards in the form of increased compensation typically were used to 

motivate teachers and principals to improve their practice. TIF grantees also provided supports 

for professional growth (e.g., professional development) that should increase the intrinsic 

rewards of teaching or being a school leader. At the same time, a few projects implicitly used 

some teachers’ and principals’ failure to earn incentive awards to motivate them to leave the 

profession. In this section, we take a closer look at the issue of motivation. 

 

44

 Performance pay outside education typically relies more on qualitative assessments of quality than the more 

quantitative measures being proposed for education and used in TIF. As a result, it is unclear the extent to which 

all findings about the effectiveness (or flaws) of those performance pay systems fully apply to thinking about 

performance pay in education (Springer 2009). 
49

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation 

Research on the motivational power of performance pay has emphasized the importance of 

teachers valuing the incentive award, seeing the link between performance and pay, and 

believing that effort will result in an award (Heneman, Milanowski, and Kimball 2007). Earlier 

research on motivation suggests that individuals are motivated by both extrinsic (e.g., money) 

and intrinsic (e.g., internal satisfaction) rewards (Bandura 1997; Deci and Ryan 1985). The most 

recent research suggests that financial rewards alone are insufficient to motivate teachers to 

improve their practice. One recent performance pay project that was studied offered financial 

incentives for performance but no supports for teachers to improve their practice. The study 

found no significant student achievement gains among Nashville middle school mathematics 

teachers who participated in a performance pay program and those who did not (Springer et al. 

2010). 

Most TIF projects included both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Educators varied in the 

extent to which they reported being motivated by intrinsic rewards, extrinsic rewards, or both. 

Their comments did not paint a simple and consistent picture of the extent to which educators 

were reportedly motivated by the performance pay provided by TIF, perhaps because 

professional norms may make educators uncomfortable saying that they are motivated by money. 

As described in preceding sections, TIF grantees included project elements designed to 

support collaboration and instructional improvement. These aspects of TIF projects could 

provide intrinsic rewards to participating educators, and interviews suggest that some educators 

found these meaningful. One teacher described how the intrinsic rewards in TIF motivated her to 

improve this way: 

I have had more feedback in three months here than in six years in my previous 

district. I knew I was good, but not as good as I could be.... I am already a 

better teacher.... The feedback is positive and gives me ways I can improve.... 

I push to have high-quality lessons every day, to challenge my students, to 

expose them to technology, to develop student engagement strategies.... I am 

thirsty to continue to improve. 

As in this case, some teachers found great satisfaction in seeing their teaching skills and 

knowledge improve and reported that supports to achieve those improvements were what they 

most appreciated. 

Responses about the extent to which extrinsic rewards motivated educators were more 

mixed. When researchers asked educators in TIF grantees about performance pay, one common 

response was that the educators appreciated the “pat on the back” of receiving an incentive 

award. Only a few educators reported being motivated by the extrinsic rewards, most reporting 

that they did not do anything different to earn an incentive award. For example, one teacher who 

found real value in TAP nonetheless dismissed the importance of the financial rewards 

embedded in TAP: 

At the end of the day, will it change me as an educator? No. I was always like 

this. Does it help me get things done? Yes. Does it make clear what’s expected 

of me? Yes. Was I on that road anyway? Yes. 

This educator exemplified those who reported that they were happy to earn an incentive 

award but were not motivated to do anything different to attain one. Some educators reported 
50

that when TIF leaders introduced the TIF project, the leaders explained that the performance pay 

would reward them for what they were already doing (as opposed to presenting the awards as an 

incentive to improve). These reports were not consistent across or even within grantees, and our 

interviews did not support any inferences about whether the way performance pay was presented 

to teachers made it more likely for them to see it as a reward for good practice as opposed to an 

incentive to improve practice. Nonetheless, the reports raised a question about whether leaders’ 

framing of performance pay may have reduced the extent to which educators saw the awards as 

incentives to improve.

The few educators who reported being motivated by financial incentives suggested that the 

size of the incentive award mattered. For example, one teacher explained how the amount of the 

incentive award affected her attention to project goals: 

They [the grantee] did some [awards] back a few years ago that were $200–

$400. By the time they take out taxes, [it’s] one dinner out at a restaurant; why 

bother if you’re going to give me $100? But $9,000, I’m really paying 

attention to my scores. Not that I wasn’t teaching hard before, but maybe I’m a 

little more focused on my teaching because that’s kind of significant.... Now 

you’re starting to say, “Wow, that’s something I can say that really made a 

difference in my pay.” 

The reported experience of teachers in one school district exemplified the potential of 

extrinsic motivation when the stakes are extremely high. Teachers there experienced a bonus 

system based on student achievement at the school and individual levels before the TIF grant, as 

well as a total revision of the salary schedule during the life of the grant. Teachers suddenly 

found their salary largely determined by multiple student achievement measures and observation 

data. As teachers reported, they did not pay much attention to the bonus program, but the radical 

change in the salary schedule got their attention: 

A year ago October at the grade level meeting, the principal rolled it out....

Being a veteran teacher, I thought it was not equitable. For me to make more 

money, I had to be exemplary [while new teachers could earn a substantial 

raise for lower-levels of performance]. It is not equitable. That is one of the 

pitfalls for veterans. A fourth-year teacher [was] rated distinguished and got a 

$20,000 raise. Then I got fired up inside. I was rated one of eight in the district 

to be exemplary. 

While data do not paint a clear picture about the extent to which the financial awards in 

TIF provided extrinsic motivation, this might not be the most important question about 

motivation because the line between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation was not always clear 

among many of the TIF grantees. 

Overall, both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators described in interviews showed potential to 

change educators’ practice, but it was actually a combination of the two that appeared to have the 

most saliency for respondents. The TIF legislation, which required incentive awards for both 

student performance and teachers taking on additional roles, facilitated the development of 

performance pay projects that included both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for educators. Those 

projects that created structures (e.g., coaches) through which teachers could improve their 

practice (intrinsic award) and effectively used signals created by financial awards (extrinsic 

awards) to build educators’ investment in the improvement effort, appeared to have the greatest 
51

potential for better teaching and learning. For example, some principals who modified their roles 

to share instructional leadership with master or mentor teachers or who spent more time 

observing instruction reported being extrinsically motivated by the financial awards and 

intrinsically motivated by their belief that the changes in their job were improving teaching and 

learning in their school. Similarly, some teachers reported making changes in their instructional 

practices both because of the extrinsic motivation of financial awards and the intrinsic 

motivation of believing that they were becoming better teachers. 

Finally, in considering the extent to which intrinsic, extrinsic, or a combination of both 

types of rewards motivated educators, it is important to examine how social desirability may 

have affected educators’ responses. It is socially desirable for educators to report that 

collaborating with each other and with instructional coaches helped them improve their practice, 

and many respondents reported these intrinsic rewards from TIF. On the other hand, for 

educators to admit to being motivated by money might suggest that they were not trying to do 

their job well before the financial incentive. And in fact, some educators reported negatively 

perceiving teachers who were motivated by money. One principal in a TIF school reported that 

he does not mention performance pay until after a new teacher has been hired because he does 

not want to hire a teacher he believes is motivated by the possibility of earning additional 

compensation for good performance: “We just weed out people who are here for the money.” 

While few teachers reported responding to financial awards from TIF, teachers have long been 

motivated to earn master’s degrees or additional credentials at least in part for the financial 

benefits. A relatively typical response that communicated both the norms of the teaching 

profession and also an appreciation of the financial awards came from one teacher who had 

received an incentive award. She explained, “It was nice to get the money, don’t get me wrong. 

But like I said, I think everyone here is going to do their job whether they get the money or not. 

It just makes you feel good [to get an award].” In the context of educators’ professional norms 

and the variation in TIF project design and implementation (which could also affect the extent to 

which TIF motivated educators), it is hard to draw conclusions about whether educators 

appreciated earning incentive awards enough to be motivated by them or were merely 

appreciative of additional compensation. 

Leaders’ Role in Implementing Performance Pay

Based on our interviews, project implementation was enhanced when the superintendent, 

other district or charter management organization leaders, along with principals and other school 

leaders consistently placed performance pay at the top of their reform agendas. In doing so, 

leaders connected performance pay to other initiatives, making performance pay part of the 

organization’s vision and strategic plan. In districts and schools in which performance pay was 

integrated in these ways, performance pay was in a position to effect broader structural and 

cultural changes. 

In districts with turnover among leadership, shifting priorities made full implementation of 

TIF projects difficult. For example, one district received a grant to pilot TAP in a small number 

of schools. After the project’s first year, the superintendent, who supported the TIF grant 

proposal, and the project staff, who authored and founded the project, left the district. The new 

superintendent was interested in performance pay but had different ideas about how to improve 

the district. As a result, the TIF-funded project never became fully integrated into the district’s 

reform plans, and the pilot project will not be expanded once the grant funds run out. 
52

In contrast, another urban district with a superintendent who was reported to be staunchly 

committed to performance pay was able to keep the TIF grant central to the long-term reform 

agenda. The superintendent made everyone aware that the TIF grant was a further step down the 

district’s path to a comprehensive restructuring of teacher compensation. In successfully 

conveying this message, the superintendent reportedly convinced educators that performance pay 

was inevitable and worked to coordinate TIF with other initiatives. The place of performance pay 

in this district’s future was never in doubt. 

School-level leadership on performance pay was also critical for implementation. 

Teachers’ reports about the performance pay project varied substantially within grantees, shaped 

partially by the interpretation of performance pay policies at the school level. Prior research 

outside of performance pay highlights the importance of local actors, such as principals and 

teachers, in adapting policies during implementation (Mehan, Hubbard and Datnow 2010; Cuban 

1998; Lipsky 1982). As suggested by this research, principals played a substantial role in 

interpreting the policy in ways that either increased or reduced the perceived relevance of TIF 

within a school. 

For example, one grantee’s TIF project included professional learning communities 

(teacher collegial work groups that met during specified times in the contract day) as a key 

strategy for instructional improvement in addition to incentive awards for student performance, 

additional roles, and additional credentials. In two visited schools, the principal and facilitator 

supported the PLC component of the project; the PLCs reportedly offered teachers the 

opportunity for meaningful collaboration on instruction. During PLC time, teachers worked 

together to analyze data on student performance and devise strategies for differentiating 

instruction to increase student performance. In contrast, at a third school in which the principal 

did not outwardly support the PLC component (and focused almost solely on the financial 

incentive component of TIF), the PLCs were seen as just another mandatory meeting. In fact, a 

teacher who was assigned to lead a book discussion the afternoon of her interview with 

researchers reported not yet having read the book. Teacher reports suggest that teachers in these 

three schools experienced a very different performance pay policy, as enacted, based on the 

principals’ prioritization of PLCs. In the schools in which principals focused on PLCs, teachers 

reported that TIF gave them supports to improve and provided financial incentives for success. 

In the third school, teachers reported perceptions of TIF as a one-dimensional financial award 

project. 

Researchers found similar contrasting examples in nearly all the TIF grantees. When TIF 

projects tried to change routines and traditional practices, they ran into schools ready to embrace 

a new approach, schools that rejected new ideas, and schools in between. As the grantees 

discovered, even the best designed performance pay system could not quickly overcome a deeply 

ingrained school culture that emphasized the equality of teachers and rejected the identification 

of more and less effective teachers. In such schools, it will, at a minimum, take longer to realize 

true changes from TIF. In schools with progressive leadership and collective ownership of the 

changes under way, TIF projects could be highly successful in the shorter term. 

Across grantees, leadership from school administrators and formal teacher leaders (e.g., 

facilitators such as master and mentor teachers) was related to teachers’ reports about their 

performance pay project. Yet while grantees aspired to make the principal the center of a more 

collaborative and instructionally focused school culture, few grantees invested significant local 

resources in professional development to help principals become instructional leaders. The 
53

majority of grantees focused more on supports for teachers than on reinventing the principal’s 

role and helping principals become expert evaluators of teaching and facilitators of instructional 

improvement. Based on interviews from key stakeholders in each grantee, it appears that overall, 

in comparison to the supports provided to teachers, support for principals to improve their 

practice was the less developed component of the TIF grantees’ projects. 

The combination of all the factors discussed previously—project design, whether 

implementation built a broad base of support among educators, and whether leaders had strong 

support for the project—all affected the likely sustainability of grantees’ projects after their 

funding ended. 

Program Sustainability 

Performance pay is intended to motivate people to improve their skills and to make 

decisions (e.g., enter or leave the profession, pursue desired job assignments, assume new roles). 

Some changes are best seen as a process of continuous improvement. To allow for continuous 

improvement, performance pay projects must be sustained, and the Department required that the 

grantee match 75 percent of the federal support by the fifth year of the grant in an attempt to 

establish sustainability after the grant period.45 This section describes grantees’ reports about 

their prospects for sustaining performance pay and the main strategies they were pursuing. 

The performance pay projects initiated in all 33 grantees had an inherent financial 

challenge given the funding versus payout structures they used. None included immediate pay 

cuts for any educators, and all offered more financial compensation for award recipients. Thus, 

payroll costs increased in all 33 grantees. To make such projects sustainable in the long run, 

grantees could either reallocate existing resources or find additional funds. Since grantees 

received their initial TIF awards, most grantees have experienced tight budgets. This change has 

made meeting the required match and ensuring sustainability even more challenging than when 

grantees submitted their initial proposals. 

The most common strategy for addressing the increased personnel costs of performance 

pay was to pursue additional grant funding. Three of the 33 grantees won large grants from a 

national foundation, one received a modest award from a local foundation (and appears likely to 

win additional private funding), and 10 won TIF Cohort 3 awards. Ten grantees are in states that 

will be participating in performance pay as part of the Race to the Top initiative. Some grantees 

had multiple new funding streams, such as Memphis and Hillsborough, which are participating 

in a Gates Foundation-funded performance pay program, received a TIF Cohort 3 grant, and are 

in Race to the Top states.46 For 15 grantees, these relatively large influxes of funding for 

performance pay will ensure that some form of the program continues past the grant period. 

However, these sources of outside funding will themselves run out at some point. Grantees 

have been slower to make fundamental changes to build sustainability in to their performance 

pay plan by cutting costs or securing long-term funds. Denver is well known for getting a 

property tax increase passed to fund ProComp, the district’s teacher performance pay program. 

To fund the project for principals, Denver eliminated cost of living increases (COLAs) in the 

 

45 Later implementation reports will examine grantees’ required reporting on whether they met the matching 

requirement. Final data are not available at this time because the grants are ongoing. 

46 Grantees are named in this section because the data are publicly available. 
54

principal salary schedule and deferred pension funding. Dallas made more modest changes, 

eliminating a $75 per year increase in base salary for every year a teacher remains in the district. 

In the short term, this will not reduce personnel costs sufficiently to fund a major performance 

pay initiative, but it was a concrete change in the compensation system.

Two grantees appear to be moving forward with fundamental changes in the salary 

schedule, with one additional grantee reporting that one desired outcome of a TIF grant is an 

entirely new compensation structure.47 Harrison School District Two in Colorado is beginning to 

implement a reformed salary structure in which none of teachers’ compensation is tied to their 

years of experience or additional degrees (in contrast to the traditional salary schedule). In 

Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the superintendent is championing major changes in educator 

compensation, and educators believe some change is imminent although the details remain 

vague. In Memphis, Hillsborough, and Pittsburgh, participation in an initiative funded by the Bill 

& Melinda Gates Foundation required a promise to overhaul the traditional salary schedule. 

Proposals in these five districts have the potential to take performance pay to a level of 

differentiation much greater than that funded by bonus awards under TIF. As one project director 

mentioned, in the long run these reforms would mean that some teachers are paid less than they 

might have expected to be paid if a traditional salary schedule had remained in place: 

We need to make this sustainable. We’re not going to rely on grant money, 

which means we need to redistribute the money that we already have for 

salaries. And that means some people are going to get less. 

Some educators expressed concerns about how such educator compensation reforms might 

affect them. Others, however, realizing the possibility that their own compensation could 

increase if they performed well, believed these changes could affect them positively. 

For grantees who have not received additional performance pay grants and have not found 

ways to cut costs to fund performance pay awards, sustainability seems unlikely. Recognizing 

this reality, at least two grantees hired outside development experts to raise funds.48 Others are 

reportedly planning to scale-back their performance pay project, reducing or eliminating 

performance awards even if they retain collaborative meeting time or other capacity-building 

project components. No project director reported that a project would end entirely when TIF 

funding runs out, but the prospects appeared bleak in some grantees. For example, in one group 

of charter schools whose final year of matching funds had to come from school budgets, four of 

the 11 participating schools dropped out of the TIF project from 2009–10 to 2010–11. In such 

grantees, the end of TIF will most likely be the end of performance pay, at least in the short term. 

The next section of the report describes the participants’ and leaders’ beliefs about the 

contributions of the TIF projects. 

 

47 Some other grantees that have received grants to undertake performance pay are probably also in the planning 

stages of major compensation reform. However, grantees that have received additional funding for performance 

pay have done so mostly in the last year. In winter 2009–10, when the research team conducted telephone 

interviews with all 33 grantees, the grantees had not applied, had not won, or were in the very early stages of 

work on these awards. Findings from those interviews on planned compensation reforms are now outdated. 

Therefore, detailed descriptions of proposed major changes and the outlook for sustainability can be provided 

only for the subset of 12 grantees where site visit data were collected in fall 2010. 

48 As described in the previous footnote, because of the timing of data collection, a comprehensive, up-to-date 

count based on all 33 grantees cannot be provided. 
55

Perceptions of Outcomes 

This evaluation was not designed to estimate the effectiveness of TIF, rather to inform 

policy by describing implementation. All TIF grantees, however, have been implementing 

performance pay long enough to generate opinions among project and district leaders, educators, 

and stakeholders about their project’s contributions to outcomes. Educators’ perceptions of 

effectiveness may not be accurate. Nonetheless perceptions are important to describe in an 

implementation report because they may influence educators’ participation and buy-in to their 

performance pay project as well as leaders’ decisions about whether to sustain these projects 

beyond the life of the TIF grant. Many respondents were cautious about the extent to which they 

attributed changes solely to TIF, noting that schools and districts typically undertake multiple 

simultaneous initiatives (in addition to TIF) designed to improve educator quality and student 

performance. Respondents recognized that they did not have the information necessary to 

disentangle the effects of multiple interrelated initiatives to be certain about the unique 

contributions of TIF. With that caveat, respondents in most grantees generally reported a sense 

that TIF was having at least some positive effects. 

This section describes grantee and participant perceptions of TIF’s influence on principal 

and teacher recruitment and retention, instructional and leadership practices, and student 

outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of grantees’ efforts to make major changes to their 

systems. 

Recruiting and Retaining Effective Educators

TIF is meant, in part, to help grantees recruit and retain high-quality educators. For 

example, grantees may offer signing bonuses for working in hard-to-staff schools or subjects. 

For a few grantees, TIF is helping district or charter schools offer potential salaries that are more 

competitive with neighboring areas’ or schools’. However, given the many contextual factors 

that influence whether principals and teachers choose to work in a particular school or area (e.g., 

the economy, geography), many respondents had difficulty attributing changes in the labor force 

directly to TIF. Still, perceptions were mixed on the extent to which TIF made a difference in 

recruitment and retention. 

Teacher Recruitment 

A third of TIF grantees (11 of the 33) explicitly included incentives to attract teachers and 

principals to hard-to-staff schools or subjects, or both, which some respondents reported to be 

largely ineffective. Two grantees allowed their participating districts’ discretion in making 

decisions about incentives. For example, in one grantee, a pool of $6,000 for teachers and $4,000 

for administrators was allocated to each district, and they were allowed to distribute recruitment 

incentives based on the identified needs of their districts. Two other grantees that once used 

recruitment bonuses stopped offering them because they did not believe they worked. The HR 

director of one district described the rationale: 

At the onset people were running to the table.... We were paying people who 

were qualified but not as good as they needed to be. We stopped doing that. 

[Now] they have to have a proficient evaluation [to receive an award]. 
56

For two grantees, TIF was an effort to attract educators to their rural settings. Both had 

difficulty attracting educators from outside the local labor market and project leaders perceived 

the incentives as insufficient to overcome their geographic challenges. 

In 11 grantees, both with and without incentive awards for hard-to-staff schools or 

subjects, at least some respondents believed that TIF was a factor that aided teacher recruitment. 

In seven grantees, there was a perception of a higher quality and quantity of candidates since the 

TIF project began, with some respondents providing anecdotal evidence of teachers choosing 

TIF schools over non-TIF schools. As one district representative said, “We’re seeing a change in 

the types of applicants, especially when they know it’s a TAP school or when they know it’s 

performance pay. We’re seeing higher quality.” Yet respondents in only three grantees explicitly 

mentioned using TIF as part of recruitment pitches. 

Teacher Retention 

Although many respondents acknowledged that the economy probably played a part in 

limiting teacher mobility, respondents in 12 grantees still felt that TIF was facilitating teacher 

retention. Respondents from 10 grantees cited improved retention rates in recent years and 

attributed them to the bonuses or the structures put in place under the TIF project. One principal 

said, “Once we have teachers in the door, people value getting the performance-based bonus.” 

Several respondents reported that TIF was keeping teachers in less desirable situations. 

Meanwhile, some teachers in a district with participating and nonparticipating schools said they 

decided against transferring to nonparticipating schools because they would not receive the 

bonus. Similarly, the external evaluator for another grantee stated, “Teachers felt strongly that if 

their incentives were to go away, their schools would lose a lot of good teachers.” In some cases, 

however, TIF was not enough to help districts compete with neighboring areas. For example, the 

substantial difference in base pay between one grantee and surrounding districts reportedly led 

some veteran teachers to leave because their state retirement was calculated on the basis of the 

higher salary that surrounding districts offered. 

TIF also could potentially improve teaching quality by pushing less effective teachers out 

of the workforce. Respondents in at least five grantees perceived this effect, explaining that 

teachers left because they did not like the greater accountability introduced by the TIF project or 

the amount of work and time it required. According to one district leader, teachers who were 

reticent about participating in more intense and open inquiries into the effectiveness of current 

instructional practices, which might have highlighted their instructional shortcomings, left after 

the TIF project was announced. One district grantee used TIF to overhaul its salary schedule, but 

respondents reported that rather than attracting new principals or teachers, it prompted resistant 

veteran teachers to leave the district. Some respondents felt this was a positive effect of the 

project, as teachers who left were seen as weaker. 

Principal Recruitment and Retention 

In 28 TIF grantees, respondents indicated that their projects had little or no influence on 

attracting and retaining effective principals. While principal turnover was quite high among 

some grantees, changes in school leadership were generally not perceived to be related to TIF. 

However, there were some positive reports from the remaining five grantees. In one of 

those grantees, pay tied to serving in a hard-to-staff school was perceived as effective in 

attracting principals and limiting attrition. In another grantee with reports of positive effects on 
57

principal staffing, TIF was perceived as causing initial attrition of “C- and D-quality” principals. 

Because of investments to better support existing principals and other new district policies 

designed to improve the leadership pipeline, the caliber of school principals was seen as 

substantially higher than before TIF. A project director for an EPIC program reported hearing 

from principals that after their schools were recognized, they found it easier to recruit assistant 

principals and had internal candidates seeking the positions. 

Instructional and Leadership Practices 

In addition to changing the composition of the educator workforce, TIF projects attempted 

to increase the number of effective teachers and administrators by changing educators’ practices. 

Educators in at least eight grantees believed that the structures established through the TIF grant 

(e.g., professional development, professional learning communities, instructional facilitators 

such as master and mentor teachers, observations and evaluations) were helping to improve 

teacher practice. These interviewees noted a change in the school culture as a result of TIF that 

made teaching a more public activity and thereby increased good instruction, collaboration, and 

student achievement. 

In grantees that implemented systemic, rubric-based evaluations and collaborative groups, 

respondents reported that those structures stimulated conversations about good instruction and 

helped teachers become more reflective about their practice. Teachers and principals reported 

that rubrics helped teachers understand the elements of effective teaching and expectations for 

what their classroom practice should cover. Knowing they could be observed at any time 

reportedly led teachers to be more thoughtful about their lesson plans and pay more attention to 

the rubrics on which they were assessed. Teachers generally reported appreciating the feedback 

they received after evaluations and observations. A teacher from a grantee that provided 

professional development and instructional facilitators (who conducted evaluations) for teachers 

said, “The program can make teachers more thoughtful, deliberate, and aware of how their 

instructional decisions impact kids.” Teachers in a district implementing TAP perceived the 

cluster meeting as making teachers more professional and changing their conversations: “When 

they sit in cluster meetings, now it’s about students and not about activities we have to plan for. 

When we meet, we only meet to talk about student achievement. It’s been a great shift for us.” 

The teachers in at least 13 grantees reported increased collaboration and collegiality that 

they perceived to be a result of collaborative structures implemented through TIF. For example, a 

teacher from a grantee working with high-poverty schools felt that the PLCs instituted through 

the grant helped foster community building in schools in which high teacher turnover typically 

had prevented it. Interviews suggest that the success of these meetings, however, depended on 

the skill of the facilitator and the teachers’ level of trust. 

Through this collaboration and feedback from evaluations and instructional facilitators, 

teachers reported trying new instructional strategies. Teachers at schools implementing 

collaborative meetings reported that the structured time enabled them to share what works in 

their classroom and to offer and receive suggestions. For example, a teacher reported learning 

about inquiry in science: 

I do not have a traditional teaching background. I am a Teach for America 

corps member, so some of the pedagogy I didn’t know as well as some other 
58

teachers, so being able to have that conversation allowed me to have a better 

understanding of science pedagogy in terms of teaching things via inquiry. 

A teacher in a grantee using TAP perceived the cluster meetings and observation rubric as 

helping her become better at providing academic feedback: “That’s one thing that’s improved in 

me because it’s not just saying good job to a child but saying why that is. Or if they get 

something wrong, tell them why it’s wrong. That has worked for me.” These positive feelings 

were not universal, however. A few teachers reported that collaborative structures and facilitators 

were not helpful or that less motivated teachers did not take advantage of them and participated 

in activities only because they were mandatory. 

With the emphasis on performance pay to improve student outcomes, respondents also 

reported that TIF focused more attention on data and data-based instruction. Discussions about 

data often occurred in the collaborative groups or with instructional facilitators. A teacher from a 

grantee that based part of teacher incentives on attendance at professional development said that 

one of the professional development sessions on data transformed her approach to classroom 

instruction. The course was intended to help teachers use data to guide reading instruction and 

create action plans in the classroom. She said, “It was so phenomenal that the information I got I 

was able to turn around the next day and start using it, which is rare.” Teachers in some grantees, 

though, felt the increased attention on data put more pressure on them, particularly those in 

tested subjects and grades. 

Respondents also believed that TIF influenced leadership practices, although the effects on 

principals were perceived to be less prevalent than the effects on teachers. Respondents 

described two main ways that they believed TIF was improving principal leadership. First, in 

projects in which principals were responsible for observing and evaluating teachers, respondents 

felt principals’ roles were shifting from those of school managers to instructional leaders. 

Respondents with systematic, rubric-based evaluation systems (e.g., TAP or Charlotte 

Danielson’s framework) credited the evaluation systems with providing principals and teachers 

with a common language for discussing instruction and a shared understanding of what counts as 

evidence of effective practices. Though data are limited, respondents in at least four grantees said 

that principals improved in their abilities to observe and give feedback to teachers and provide 

and use data. Second, in projects in which teachers assumed some significant additional roles, 

respondents reported that the new structure caused principals to practice more distributed 

leadership. There were a few negative reports of principal effects, however, with some 

respondents suggesting that TIF made principals focus more on test scores and encourage 

teaching to the test. 

Given the largely positive reports of TIF’s influence on teacher and principal quality, many 

respondents felt TIF had the potential to improve student achievement. The next section 

describes respondents’ perceptions of TIF’s effect on student outcomes. 

Student Achievement 

Many respondents recognized that they could not disentangle the effects of TIF from other 

initiatives under way at the schools and districts. Evaluators interviewed raised similar cautions 

about inferring that TIF had “caused” any changes based on data currently available. Others felt 

there were not enough years of data to be confident about results. 
59

Respondents in many grantees believed TIF had the potential to improve student outcomes, 

particularly through the changes in leadership and instructional practices described above. The 

project director of one grantee said, “You will see huge pockets of teachers from certain schools 

having their students’ test scores jump or steadily improve, and those are the ones who are 

getting the TIF money. When the fellow teachers see the payouts, they get encouraged.” Some 

respondents cited anecdotal evidence in support of the hypothesis that TIF was already 

improving student outcomes. A teacher at a TAP school that saw gains in student achievement 

attributed them to “the way teachers are implementing [TAP] and making sure kids are getting 

all the information they need.” Whether or not improvements in student outcomes actually can 

be tied to the TIF projects, educators’ beliefs that they are linked provided motivation for them to 

keep participating. We report perceptions of the effects of TIF on student outcomes because 

stakeholders’ beliefs about TIF’s effects can influence implementation and sustainability. 

Systems Change 

Of all the perceived outcomes, perhaps none is more significant than the view of 

compensation reform as one piece of a broad change in the education system. Grantees that held 

this view turned the many implementation challenges into opportunities to change evaluation 

systems, professional development approaches, principals’ roles and responsibilities, their use of 

data, their assessment systems, their curriculum, and their expectations for teachers. Moreover, 

through these changes, they attempted to transform the culture of the schools, the traditional 

attitudes and beliefs of classroom teachers and principals, and the roles and responsibilities of 

district administrators. 

Changing the entire system will take considerable time, much longer than the life of the 

TIF grant. Denver’s ProComp program is often viewed as the pioneer in replacing the traditional 

salary schedule for teachers. While Denver’s TIF grant was devoted to developing a new 

compensation system for principals, Denver’s prolonged effort to reinvent teacher compensation, 

garner educator and public support for compensation reform, and craft a fair and understandable 

system is a testament to the challenges associated with making system change. Plans to revamp 

its systems and to replace the traditional salary schedules are under way in CharlotteMecklenburg but will not be realized until after that TIF grant ends. Efforts in progress to 

overhaul the salary schedules in Memphis, Hillsborough County, and Pittsburgh are being fueled 

by large grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Six grantees included charter 

schools that have the advantage of being smaller and more nimble systems, but they, too, need 

time to build the evaluation, assessment, and professional development components to support 

compensation reform. 

Perhaps the most ambitious changes that have taken place under TIF occurred in Harrison 

School District in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Harrison replaced its old salary schedule, which 

was based on experience and education, with an eight-step system incorporating multiple 

measures of performance. The new salary schedule began in the 2010–11 school year, after more 

than four years of reinvention of the teacher and principal evaluation systems; realignment of the 

curriculum to state and local standards; development of an assessment system that measures 

student performance in every grade and subject; major changes in the roles, responsibilities, and 

skills of principals; establishment of a new data system; and a rethinking of its professional 

development strategies. 
60

Harrison’s leadership viewed performance pay as the last piece of the comprehensive 

change in the education system. Harrison first focused on building instructional leadership of 

district officials, principals, and assistant principals. As part of the new system, beginning 

teachers are observed 16 times per year, while veteran teachers are observed eight times a year. 

The large number of required observations has had the effect of restructuring the jobs of school 

leaders. Principals reported that they retained all of their former responsibilities but that their 

priority during the school day was to conduct observations. All observers undergo continuous 

training, including regular workshops in which videotapes of teaching are used to improve 

interrater reliability. The hiring of new principals and assistant principals includes rating their 

ability to conduct classroom observations and accurately assess the quality of the instruction they 

witness. 

The teacher evaluation system also includes the use of student test scores from both the 

state tests and locally developed assessments of every subject and every grade. Teachers 

administer the local assessments every eight weeks, and the results are quickly returned to the 

teachers and the principals, who are then expected to use the data to refine their instructional 

practices. Similarly, principals and assistant principals are expected to provide teachers with 

written and oral feedback after each classroom observation. Teachers’ placement on the eightstep salary schedule is determined by an equal combination of observation ratings and student 

achievement. 

Teachers’ introduction to the new emphasis on instructional leadership and feedback began 

when the superintendent ordered that all classroom doors remain open during instruction. Since 

then the district has worked to ensure that teachers have a clear understanding of what is 

expected of them and provide them with multiple supports to help improve their practice. 

Schools are organized into PLCs, and teachers receive clear guidance on the curriculum they 

should use and the skills their students need to acquire. In addition, teachers are involved in 

developing the local assessments and are represented on a panel (two teacher representatives 

from each school) charged with making recommendations to improve the system. 

Notably, both district leadership and teachers emphasized that all of the system changes 

were works in progress. Our respondents readily acknowledged that the local assessments need 

to be refined to become valid and reliable, that the observations were still lacking interrater 

reliability, and that some special circumstances (e.g., how to assess the effectiveness of special 

education teachers) had not been anticipated when the system was developed. Indeed, many in 

the district were not happy with the ambitiousness of the change or the added stress of working 

under the performance pay system. Still, the majority of individuals we interviewed believed that 

the district was working to resolve these problems and that the teacher evaluation and 

compensation system would be better in a few years. 

The Harrison example, as well as the examples from the other grantees that see themselves 

as engaged in systems change, should give pause to policymakers eager to quickly implement 

compensation reform. Remaking so many components of the education system in an era of 

declining resources has not been fully realized in the short term by even the most ambitious 

grantees. At the same time, these grantees’ perception of the progress they have made in 

advancing systems change is perhaps the most significant undertaking related to the TIF program 

to date. 
61

Conclusion 

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 their students’ 

academic achievement. As states and districts embark on performance pay reforms, they can 

look to the experience of the 33 TIF grantees to provide some lessons. The grantees implemented 

varied projects in diverse contexts, providing an instructive sample from which others can learn. 

One major lesson learned is that despite the straightforward logic of performance pay, 

implementation proved to be a complex endeavor. The TIF grantees soon realized that 

compensation reform requires high-capacity human resources, management, information, and 

instructional support systems. Moreover, compensation reform challenges deep-seated traditions 

of teacher and school culture that have not embraced the idea of differentiating teachers based on 

their performance, much less compensating them based on those differences. To engage 

educators in such substantial change, grantees needed to not only design their systems 

thoughtfully and administer them fairly, but also attend to how they were perceived by educators. 

Perhaps because this work was so multi-faceted, even for the most ambitious TIF grantees, 

systems and culture change is slow going. Yet even in the early stages, respondents perceive that 

some of their hard work may be paying off in improvements in educator quality and the systems 

and culture in their schools and districts. 

Existing knowledge about how to make performance pay a transformative reform is 

relatively sparse. The tendency of those charged with developing and supporting new 

performance pay projects is to identify the variety of implementation challenges and then 

develop lists of ways to overcome them. Expert advice to those planning new performance pay 

projects typically includes broad guidance: 

Several elements contribute to effective performance-based accountability 

systems: establishing goals that are widely shared among the groups involved, 

providing clear and observable measures, and offering incentives to individuals 

or organizations with control over the process. Creating an effective system 

also requires choosing the right design for it and then monitoring, evaluating, 

and adjusting it to meet performance goals (Buddin and McCaffrey 2010 11, 

p. 4). 

Such advice is consistent with the TIF grantees’ experience. However, general advice and long 

checklists of components that must be in place may not be enough to overcome the uneven 

implementation from one school to the next, even within the same grantee, that was so apparent 

among the TIF grantees. 

Our analysis highlighted the importance of planning, leadership, accurate and believable 

assessments of teaching and learning, communications, supports to help educators earn incentive 

awards, the proper size of awards, the appropriate level of accomplishment to earn an award, 

sustainability planning, and more. Grantees that did not consider all these design aspects found 

that their project was slow to fundamentally change the way educators’ approach teaching and 

leading. 
62

Looking across the grantees, it appears that the variation in TIF project implementation 

ultimately was determined in the day-to-day operations and the culture of the individual school. 

Grantees needed a receptive culture in schools, one in which educators were willing to take a 

chance at reforms that closely scrutinized their practice and a proactive plan for helping other 

schools and educators become increasingly receptive. While reformers are right to call attention 

to the challenges of remaking the human capital systems at the state and district levels, our 

informants emphasized that the successful implementation of the new systems is dependent on a 

school-level acceptance of a culture of differentiation by performance. The experience of the TIF 

grantees suggests that acceptance of a culture of differentiation cannot be imposed but must be 

infused into all levels of the system. 
63

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67

Appendixes

To date, the evaluation team has undertaken three data collection and analysis activities to 

understand TIF program implementation and educator perceptions of performance pay: (1) in 

fall 2009, review of the 34 grantees’ proposals, annual performance reports, and any existing 

local evaluation reports; (2) in spring 2010, telephone interviews in 34 grantees; and (3) in fall 

2010, site visits to 12 grantees. A snapshot of the data collected during all three data collection 

and analysis activities is presented here in the following appendixes: 

Appendix A—The interview protocols 

Appendix B—Overview of the demographics of the grantees and the number of grantees 

with preexisting performance pay projects 

Appendix C—Data on eligibility and participation and the number of grantees that used 

the award components represented in this appendix as they were described to the research team 

during the telephone interviews and the first round of site visits. Multiple attempts were made by 

the research team to collect the most accurate and up-to-date data on all of the components. For 

the 21 grantees that were not selected for site visits, their data are current as of May 2010, and 

for the 12 site visited grantees, their data are current as of December 2010. 

Eligibility and participation data come from a variety of sources. When possible, the 

numbers used are those provided by project staff. However, in some cases, when these data were 

unavailable, grantee-provided payout data were used to calculate approximate numbers of 

eligible and participating administrators and teachers. 

Data on project components largely come from interviews with project staff or from 

documents that project staff provided to the research team. In some cases, given the complexity 

of the grantee projects and the need for clarity when providing counts of grantees that use a 

particular award component, researchers had to establish decision rules on how to classify 

grantees. One statewide grantee, for example, has four participating districts, each of which is 

implementing the performance pay project differently. Therefore, if these award component 

categories applied to any of these four districts, the grantee was counted as a Yes. Footnotes are 

used throughout to explain our classifications. 

Appendix D—The most recent payout data collected from grantees. These data include all 

non-TIF and TIF performance payments but only in schools included in TIF-funded projects. In 

all but two grantees, data were from the 2008–09 school year. The other two grantees provided 

2007–08 data because they had not made a 2008–09 payout at the time of researchers’ data 

collection. Grantee identification numbers used for the teacher payout awards exhibit do not 

correspond with numbers used in the administrator payout exhibit. 

Appendix E—Comparison of project requirements across TIF cohorts based on Federal 

Register notices 

Appendix F—Glossary of terms used in the body of the report 
68

.
69

Appendix A: Interview Protocols 
70
71

Interview Protocol: TIF Project Staff 

(project directors, other project staff, TA providers, and evaluators) 

I. Background 

1. Tell me about your background. 

a. How and when did you come to serve as [role] for this project? 

b. Do you currently hold other roles in addition to [role]?

2. What are your job responsibilities? 

a. Liaison with other partners, such as ED, evaluators, etc? 

b. Serve as the grantee representative? In what ways? 

c. Participate in internal evaluations? 

d. Reporting 

3. [For the Project Director] Are there other individuals you work with as a team on this project (e.g., 

administrative data, personnel, professional development)? 

a. What are their roles, names, and contact information? 

b. Would you be willing to contact them to let them know that we will want to interview them? 

4. What motivated your school/district to participate in TIF? How does TIF align with other 

initiatives in your school/district? 

a. Are there other initiatives focused on improving teacher quality and effectiveness? Please 

describe. 

II. Context/Participation in TIF 

5. Does your State/district/school have a history of performance pay plans or an existing 

performance pay plan? Does the TIF project build on an existing project? 

a. How does the TIF project relate to the pre-existing project? 

b. Are there successes of those projects that you hope to replicate here? Are there 

difficulties/failures of those projects you hope to avoid? 

6. Did you participate in planning your TIF project? If so, please describe your 

State/district/school’s process for planning the initiative. If not, please describe your 

understanding of the process. 

a. Why did your State/district/school apply? 

b. Who participated in planning the project? 

c. How long was the planning period? 

d. What were the major issues? 

III. Project Design 

7. What are the key goals of the performance pay project? Include discussion of “official” and 

“unofficial” goals (stated/unstated). 

8. How many teachers are there in participating schools? (Provide the total number of teachers, 

regardless of program eligibility or participation.) 
72

9. Who is eligible to receive an award in the performance pay project (teachers, administrators, 

staff, particular subsets of teachers)? 

a. Please provide the number of “eligible” schools/administrators/teachers 

10. What is the target goal for number/percentage of participating schools/administrators/teachers 

(if known)? 

a. What is the plan for increasing/sustaining participation? 

b. Do you foresee any challenges in implementing the plan? 

11. Can you describe the process for selecting schools/districts into the project? 

a. Were there criteria for inclusion other than meeting the requirement that 30% or more of 

students be eligible for Free/Reduced Lunch? If so, what were they? 

b. Did you invite, request, or require schools to join the grant? Did all schools that were 

requested in fact join? 

c. Did all schools that met the minimum FRL requirement join the grant? If no, how many did 

not? Did any schools that did not meet the minimum FRL requirement express interest in 

joining the grant? If yes, can you identify those schools? 

12. Please provide the number of participating schools, administrators, and teachers. 

a. Could individuals opt-in or was participation mandatory? Can you describe any differences 

between those who opted-in compared to those who did not? 

b. If mandatory for some but not others, how was that determined? 

13. How many students are potentially affected by the project (based on scope of project and 

participation rates)? What proportion of all students in the school/district/State do these 

students represent? 

14. What outcomes and/or activities are rewarded in the project? Please describe for both teachers 

and principals. 

15. For each activity, what are the criteria (benchmarks, steps, achievements) required to earn an 

award? 

16. Is professional development part of the project? If YES, 

a. What type of professional development has been offered? How were decisions about topics, 

focus, development and delivery made? 

b. (If not already clear) Are all teachers/principals required to attend professional development to 

be eligible for an award? 

17. In addition to PD, what supports are in placed to help participants earn a reward? 

18. What is the award range for each school/administrator/teacher? 

a. How is the award amount for each activity determined? 

b. What is the typical amount awarded to schools/administrators/teachers? 

c. Do you consider these awards to be substantial, relative to the existing pay of 

teachers/administrators and the amount of additional work/responsibility they take on? 

d. Have there been any changes to the award structure over time? 

19. How many principals and teachers have received awards each year (if known)? 
73

20. What data are currently available in the district/State about teacher and/or principal 

performance? How long has this data system been in place? 

a. How are these data used to make performance pay decisions? What does the process look 

like from beginning to end? How is that process going? (Take us through the stages of 

linking data to teachers, to making performance pay decisions, notifying teachers and others, 

appeals process if any, etc.) 

III. Project Implementation and Communication 

21. How were project components communicated to teachers, principals, and the community, 

including the media, if at all? 

a. How do schools stay informed about [name of project]? 

22. How has the project implementation gone so far? 

a. Were there differences in rollout across schools and districts? 

b. Which stakeholders were especially difficult to bring on board (if any)? 

c. Which stakeholders were involved in rolling out the performance pay project? 

d. What worked or didn’t work? 

e. What aspects of the project have been hardest or harder to put in place? 

f. Were there any components that your [grantee] did not have the capacity to implement as 

designed? (may include sufficient budget, capacity of data systems, etc) 

23. What changes to the project are expected? 

a. What issues arose that caused these changes to be recommended? 

b. How and when will changes be implemented? 

IV. Evaluation 

24. Does the project have an internal evaluation? External evaluation? 

a. Who is conducting the internal evaluation? 

b. To what extent do you include adequate formative evaluation procedures for ensuring 

feedback and continuous improvement in the operation of the project? 

c. Who is the external evaluator/contact info? How was the external evaluator selected? 

FOR EVALUATORS ONLY (If an evaluator has not yet been selected, ask the project director) 

25. Please describe the evaluation design. What is the analysis plan? 

a. Is there a comparison group? If yes, please describe. 

26. What data are available and what is the quality of the data? 

27. What are you finding about student learning and other student outcomes? Teacher learning, 

skills, and other teacher outcomes (e.g., recruitment, retention, attendance?) 

28. What have been the main challenges associated with the evaluation? (e.g., state and local data 

systems? Access?) 

29. How are the evaluation results being used? By whom? 
74

V. Perceived Outcomes 

30. Have you noticed a change in the qualifications of teacher and principal applicants you would 

attribute to initiation of your performance pay project? What gives you that impression? 

31. Has there been a change in teacher or principal retention? To what do you attribute these 

changes? 

32. Do you think that principal leadership will eventually improve as a result of the incentives? If so 

why? If not, why not? 

33. Do you think that teacher practice will eventually improve as a result of the incentives? If so, 

why? If not, why not?

34. Do you think that student learning has improved as a result of the incentives? 

35. What is the district/State/school plan for continuing the performance pay project when TIF 

funding expires? 

a. What do you think are the challenges to continuing the performance pay project? 

VIIII. Closing 

36. From your perspective as [role], what do you think would improve the effectiveness of the 

performance pay project? 
75

Interview Protocol: District and State Grantee Staff 

(superintendent, district HR staff, state level coordinators) 

I. Background 

1. Tell me about your background. 

a. How and when did you come to be involved in this project? 

b. What is your role in this project? 

2. What motivated your school/district to participate in TIF? How does TIF align with other initiatives 

in your school/district? 

a. Are there other initiatives focused on improving teacher quality and effectiveness? Please 

describe. 

II. Context/Participation in TIF 

3. Does the State/district/school have a history of performance pay plans or an existing performance 

pay plan? 

a. How does the TIF project relate to the pre-existing project? 

b. Are there successes of those projects that you hope will be replicated here? Are there 

difficulties/failures of those projects you hope will be avoided? 

4. Did you participate in planning your TIF project? If so, please describe your State/district/school’s 

process for planning the initiative. If not, please describe your understanding of the process. 

a. Why did your State/district/school apply? 

b. Who participated in planning the project? 

c. How long was the planning period? 

d. What were the major issues? 

III. Project Design 

5. What are the key goals of the performance pay project? How do you feel about those goals? 

6. Who is eligible to receive an award in the performance pay project (school/administrator/teacher)? 

Do these seem to be the right individuals? 

7. What outcomes and/or activities are rewarded in the project? Please describe for both teachers and 

principals. Do those seem like the right outcomes/activities? What others might you suggest? 

8. What are the criteria for receiving each award? Do you feel that they fairly take into account factors 

over which teachers have control? 

9. What data are currently available in the district/State about teacher and/or principal performance? 

How long has this data system been in place? 

a. How are these data used to make performance pay decisions? How is that process going from 

your perspective? Have people you’ve encountered been generally satisfied with how it’s going?

10. What is the award range for each school/administrator/teacher? 
76

a. How is the award amount for each activity determined? Does this seem fair to you? Do you 

think the award is sensible? 

b. Do you consider these awards to be substantial, relative to the existing pay of 

teachers/administrators and the amount of additional work/responsibility they take on? On what 

basis do you make this claim? 

IV. Project Implementation and Communication 

11. How were project components communicated to teachers, principals, and the community? Were you 

involved in the communication plan? 

a. How do schools stay informed about [name of project]? 

12. How has the project implementation gone so far? 

a. Were there differences in rollout across schools and districts? 

b. Which stakeholders were especially difficult to bring on board (if any)? 

c. Which stakeholders were involved in rolling out the performance pay project? 

d. What worked or didn’t work?

e. Were there any components that your [grantee] did not have the capacity to implement as 

designed? (Note: this could include having budget to offer the PD that was required, provide any 

support designed into their project) 

13. What changes to the project are expected? Why? 

14. What is the district/State/school plan for continuing the performance pay project when TIF funding 

expires? 

a. What percent of the teacher personnel budget is currently devoted to pay-for-performance? Is 

the amount expected to get larger or smaller in coming years? Why? 

V. Evaluation 

15. How will you know if the project has achieved its goals? (How do you measure progress towards 

them?) 

16. Does the project have an internal evaluation? External evaluation? 

a. What do you expect to learn from an evaluation? 

b. Do you have a continuous improvement/formative evaluation process in place that allows you 

to modify the specifics of the project?

VI. Perceptions of Outcomes 

(FOR NON-HR RESPONDENTS) 

17. Have you noticed a change in the qualifications of teacher and principal applicants you would 

attribute to initiation of your performance pay project? What gives you that impression? 

18. Do you think that teacher practice will eventually improve as a result of the incentives? If so, why? If 

not, why not?

19. What aspects of teacher practice did you hope would improve as a result of TIF? Why? 

a. How were the awards designed to target these particular issues? 
77

b. Do you believe that, to date, teachers are teaching better (has teacher practice has improved 

in a way that meets your hopes)? 

Are they using research-based instructional techniques, improved curriculum, or 

improved strategies for working with diverse learners? Why or why not? 

On what basis do you make that claim (e.g., observation of instruction, numbers of 

teachers receiving awards, improvements in evaluations of teachers, reports from 

parents/students, combination? 

20. Do you think that principal leadership will eventually improve as a result of the incentives? If so 

why? If not, why not? 

21. Do you think that student learning has improved as a result of the incentives? 

22. What aspects of student learning did you hope would improve as a result of this project? 

a. How were the awards designed to target these particular issues? 

b. Do you perceive that, to date, TIF has had that desired effect? 

c. What other projects are going on simultaneously in your district that might explain any 

increases in student learning that might be confounded (confused) with an eventual outcome 

of TIF (e.g., student pay-for-grades, other teaching projects like Teach for America, major 

changes to curriculum and instruction, etc.?)

(FOR DISTRICT LEADER AND/OR HR RESPONDENTS) 

23. Has TIF had any impact on recruitment and retention of teachers for participating schools? 

a. What is the average teacher turnover rate for your school/district in a given year? 

b. Why do people leave? Where do they go? What are the characteristics of teachers who leave? 

c. What are the characteristics of typical applicants to your school/district? (level of education, 

certification, years of experience) 

24. How easy is it for your district to attract and retain desired school leaders? 

25. How, if at all, has TIF impacted principal recruitment, retention and leadership? 

a. How do you define a “desired” school leader? Do you have any standard objective 

measures? 

b. What is the average turnover rate of principals in your district/school? Who leaves? Are 

those who leave more or less qualified? 

c. What are the characteristics of typical applicants for principal positions? 

Do they come more from within your district or outside? 

Do they have previous experience as principals? In other leadership positions? 

Other than TIF, do you have any special principal leadership development 

academies that might explain any increase in the number of desired school leaders 

who are being recruited to and retained in your schools? 

Is it possible to tell whether the TIF project is responsible for this shift in desirable 

school leaders? 
78

X. Closing 

26. From your perspective as [title], what do you think would improve the effectiveness of TIF [name of 

project]? 
79

Interview Protocol: Educators 

(teachers and principals) 

I. Background 

1. Tell me about your background. 

a. What is your current job? If an administrator, are you a full principal? If a teacher, what 

grade(s)/subject(s) do you teach? 

b. How and when did you begin this assignment? 

c. What did you do prior to your current position? 

d. Do you participate in the TIF project (if participation is optional)? 

II. Context/Participation in TIF 

2. Does your State/district/school have a history of performance pay plans or an existing performance 

pay plan (aside from TIF)? 

a. How does the TIF project relate to the pre-existing project? (Probe for whether the 

respondent can correctly identify what is and is not TIF if there is more than TIF currently 

being implemented). 

b. How successful was the previous/other project(s)? 

3. Did you participate in planning your TIF project? If so, please describe your State/district/school’s 

process for planning the initiative. If not, please describe the process based on what you have heard. 

a. Why did your State/district/school apply? 

b. Who participated in planning the project? 

c. How were individuals (you) selected to participate in the planning process? Do you consider 

yourself fairly typical of the attitudes and judgments of your colleagues, or would you 

describe yourself as more “reform-minded” or “willing to experiment” with education 

innovations, including compensation? 

d. How long was the planning period? 

e. What were the major issues? 

III. Project Design and Implementation 

the purpose of several of these questions is to check for an accurate understanding of the project and then perceived fairness. The 

“correct” answers about project design are gathered from other respondents

4. Are you currently participating in your school/district/state TIF project? 

5. How did you first hear about [grantee’s name] TIF project? Is this how most teachers/principals heard 

about it? (If not, describe how others heard about it.) 

6. What are the key goals of the TIF [name of project]? 

7. What outcomes and/or activities are principals/teachers eligible to be rewarded for in the project? 

a. Is the TIF project attaching additional pay to the “right” things? Why or why not?
80

8. How are teachers/principals evaluated for an award? Describe the process. (Note: principals should 

address these questions for the principal and teacher evaluation processes.) 

If a new evaluation system is in place: 

a. What was the traditional evaluation system like? Was it perceived as fair by your colleagues? 

What did they like about it? What did they not like? 

b. What do(es) the new evaluations measure? 

c. Who conducts the evaluation(s)? 

d. How and to what extent is performance feedback built-in to the system? 

e. Are the evaluations seen as fair by teachers/principals? Why or why not? 

f. Did the evaluation system change significantly because of the TIF grant? If so, how? 

9. How are award decisions made? What data are used? 

10. What are your perceptions of the quality of the State/district data systems? 

a. Are data perceived as complete and accurate? 

b. Are measures perceived as useful and appropriate? (Probe for whether the evaluation system 

described above is used for determining awards.) 

11. Have you spoken with other teachers/principals about how they feel about [name of project] and/or 

incentive pay in general? 

a. Do the teachers/principals that are participating agree with and support the goals and 

strategies of [name of project]?

b. Do most teachers/principals participate in TIF? (If participation is not universal) Why do 

some people choose not to participate in TIF? 

c. (If participation is not universal) How do non-participating teachers feel about TIF? 

12. How has project implementation gone so far?

a. Has anything gone particularly well? 

b. If you have participated, is there anything that has been particularly confusing? Rewarding? 

c. Has anything been particularly challenging? If any major errors were made, why do you think 

they occurred? 

d. Overall would you say that the TIF project is fair? 

13. Have there been any changes to your TIF project so far? What do you think led to those changes? 

(Probe for whether practitioner concerns were a cause of the changes). Do you think those changes 

have improved the project? Why or why not?

IV. Perceived Outcomes 

14. (If respondent participates in TIF) Have you received awards? What have they been for? Did you feel they 

were substantial given your base pay and the amount of work you had to do to get them? Why or 

why not?

15. (If the respondent participates in TIF) When you began participating in TIF, how likely did you think it 

would be for you to earn an award? What supports are present or lacking to help you achieve the 

awards?
81

16. What, if anything, have you done differently because of the project? 

a. Have you stayed in a particular position (e.g., principal at a high-need school, teacher in a 

hard-to-staff subject) because of the possibility of earning an award? 

b. Have you participated in additional professional development activities specifically tied to 

TIF? Please describe. Have they been useful? 

c. Have you tried new instructional/leadership practices or new teaching strategies as a result 

of TIF? Please describe. 

17. How do you think parents and the community view the TIF project? Do they know about it? Are the 

results of the system reported widely? Do you think the reporting is adequate?

V. Closing 

18. From your perspective as [title of respondent], what do you think would improve the effectiveness of the

performance pay project? 

19. Is there anything else you think we need to know about the TIF project in [grantee name]?
82

Interview Protocol: Stakeholders 

(union president, parents, community, media, school board) 

I. Background 

1. Tell me about your background. 

a. How and when did you come to be involved in this project? 

2. What motivated your school/district to participate in TIF? How does TIF align with other initiatives 

in your school/district? 

a. Are there other initiatives focused on improving teacher quality and effectiveness? Please 

describe. 

II. Context/Participation in TIF 

3. Does the State/district/school have a history of performance pay plans or an existing performance 

pay plan? 

a. How does the TIF project relate to the pre-existing project? 

b. Are there successes of those projects that you hope will be replicated here? Are there 

difficulties/failures of those projects you hope will be avoided? 

4. Did you participate in planning your TIF project? If so, please describe your State/district/school’s 

process for planning the initiative. If not, describe your understanding of the process. 

a. Why did your State/district/school apply? 

b. Was there any particular champion for the issue? 

c. Was their outside pressure to participate? 

d. Who participated in planning the project? 

e. (For Teacher Association Representatives) Please describe the process by which the district 

and the Teacher Association/union worked on the TIF initiative. 

f. How long was the planning period? 

g. What were the major issues? 

III. Project Design 

5. What are the key goals of the performance pay project? How do you feel about those goals? 

6. Who is eligible to receive an award in the performance pay project (school/administrator/teacher)? 

Do these seem to be the right individuals? 

7. What outcomes and/or activities are rewarded in the project? Please describe. Do those seem like the 

right outcomes/activities? What others might you suggest? 

8. Do you consider the size of awards to principals and teachers to be appropriate? Is the amount of 

substantial, relative to the existing pay of teachers/administrators and the amount of additional 

work/responsibility they take on? 

9. Do you feel that awards fairly take into account factors over which teachers have control? 
83

III. Project Implementation and Communication 

10. How were project components communicated to teachers, principals, and the community? 

a. How do schools stay informed about [name of project]? 

11. How has the project implementation gone so far? 

a. Were there differences in rollout across schools and districts? 

b. Which stakeholders were especially difficult to bring on board (if any)? 

c. Which stakeholders were involved in rolling out the performance pay project? 

d. What worked or didn’t work?

e. Were there any components that your [grantee] did not have the capacity to implement as 

designed? (Note: this could include having budget to offer the PD that was required, 

sufficient data systems, etc.) 

12. What changes to the project are expected? Why? 

13. What is the State/district/school plan for continuing the performance pay project when TIF funding 

expires? 

IV. Evaluation 

14. How do you know if the project has achieved its goals? 

15. Does the project have an internal evaluation? External evaluation? 

a. What do you expect to learn from an evaluation? 

V. Perceptions of Outcomes 

16. Has there been a change in teacher or principal retention? 

17. Do you think that principal leadership will eventually improve as a result of the incentives? If so 

why? If not, why not? 

18. Do you think that teacher practice will eventually improve as a result of the incentives? If so, why? If 

not, why not?

19. Do you think that student learning has improved as a result of the incentives? 

VIIII. Closing 

19. From your perspective as [title], what do you think would improve the effectiveness of TIF [name of 

project]? 
84
85

Appendix B. Profile of TIF grantees 

State

Grantee 

Name

Grantee 

Type Cohort

Previous 

Experience 

with 

Performance 

pay

No. of 

Participating 

Schools

Whole 

Districta

Demographic Datab

White 

Students

African 

American 

Students

Hispanic 

Students

Asian 

Students

Native 

American 

Students

Free or Reduced-Price 

Lunch

AK Chugach 

School District LEA 1 Yes 29 Yes 23% 1% 2% 1% 71% 54%

AZ

Amphitheater 

Unified School 

District

LEA 2 Yes 11 No 53% 4% 37% 4% 2% 42%

CA

Lynwood 

Unified School 

District

LEA 2 No 18 Yes 0% 7% 92% 0% 0% 97%

CA

Mare Island 

Technology 

Academyc

Charter 

School 1

CO Eagle County 

Schools LEA 1 Yes 15 Yes 47% 0% 52% 1% 0% 34%

CO

Harrison 

School District 

2

LEA 1 No 21 Yes 30% 22% 40% 5% 2% 66%

CO School District 

of Denver LEA 1 Yes 120 Yes 23% 17% 56% 3% 1% 66%

CO Weld County 

Schools LEA 2 Yes 5 Yes 33% 1% 64% 1% 0% 56%

FL

Hillsborough 

County 

Schools

LEA 2 Yes 116 No 44% 23% 30% 3% 0% 55%

 

a

 The “whole district” category includes two grantees, School of Excellence and Education and the Algiers Charter School Association, that are not “districts” 

but implement a pay-for-performance program across all charter schools managed by the organization. This classification also includes Edward Brooke 

Charter School which is a single school. 

b

 Demographic data come from two different sources: 1) district data from the NCES Common Core of Data; and 2) grantee documents (Grantees whose data 

come from grantee documents are marked with an asterisk.). Occasionally, in grantees implementing the project in a subset of high-poverty schools, the 

numbers presented here may underestimate the percentage of free or reduced price lunch students. 

c

 Mare Island Technology Academy withdrew from participation in the TIF program during the course of the evaluation, therefore, no data is reported. 

8

5
86

State

Grantee 

Name

Grantee 

Type Cohort

Previous 

Experience 

with 

Performance 

pay

No. of 

Participating 

Schools

Whole 

Districta

Demographic Datab

White 

Students

African 

American 

Students

Hispanic 

Students

Asian 

Students

Native 

American 

Students

Free or Reduced-Price 

Lunch

FL

School Board 

of Miami-Dade 

County LEA 2 Yes 36 No 9% 26% 63% 1% 0% 64%

FL

School Board 

of Orange 

County

LEA 2 Yes 10 No 35% 28% 32% 4% 0% 50%

IL

Chicago 

Public Schools LEA 1 No 29 No 9% 47% 41% 4% 0% 73%

LA

National 

Institute for 

Excellence in 

Teaching

(Algiers 

Charter 

Schools 

Association)

Nonprofit 

organization 1 Yes 9 Yes 1% 97% 1% 1% 0% 93%

MA

Edward 

Brooke 

Charter 

School

Nonprofit 

organization 2 Yes 1 Yes 1% 75% 20% 2% 0% 71%

MD

Prince 

George’s 

County 

Schools

LEA 2 No 20 No 5% 73% 19% 3% 0% 47%

Multi

New Leaders, 

Inc.

Nonprofit 

organization 1 No 145 No *12% *59% *25% *1% *2% *67%

NC

CharlotteMecklenburg 

Schools

Nonprofit 

organization 2 Yes 20 No 34% 46% 16% 5% 1% 46%
87

State

Grantee 

Name

Grantee 

Type Cohort

Previous 

Experience 

with 

Performance 

pay

No. of 

Participating 

Schools

Whole 

Districta

Demographic Datab

White 

Students

African 

American 

Students

Hispanic 

Students

Asian 

Students

Native 

American 

Students

Free or Reduced-Price 

Lunch

NC

Cumberland 

County 

Schools

LEA 2 Yes 5 No 37% 52% 7% 2% 2% 52%

NC

Guilford 

County 

Schools

LEA 1 Yes 8 No 40% 46% 9% 5% 0% 46%

NM

Northern New 

Mexico 

Network

LEA 1 No 19 Nod 9% 1% 83% 1% 7% 96%

NY

Center for 

Education-al 

Change –

Public 

Education 

Association

Nonprofit 

organization

2 No 10 No 6% 45% 43% 2% 0% 81%

OH Ohio 

Department of 

Education

SEA 1 Yes 183 Noe 26% 65% 7% 1% 0% 65%

OK Beggs School 

District LEA 2 No 3 Yes 48% 7% 4% 0% 41% 62%

PA School District 

of Philadelphia LEA 1 Yes 67 No 0% 65% 35% 0% 0% 80%

PA School District 

of Pittsburgh LEA 2 Yes 11 Yes 37% 60% 1% 2% 0% 63%

 

d

 Northern New Mexico is a multidistrict grantee. One district implements the pay-for-performance program in all schools, the second district implements in 

only two schools. 

e

 Ohio is a statewide grantee that has implemented two distinct pay-for-performance programs across two entire districts as well as two smaller pilot programs 

in two other districts. 
88

State

Grantee 

Name

Grantee 

Type Cohort

Previous 

Experience 

with 

Performance 

pay

No. of 

Participating 

Schools

Whole 

Districta

Demographic Datab

White 

Students

African 

American 

Students

Hispanic 

Students

Asian 

Students

Native 

American 

Students

Free or Reduced-Price 

Lunch

SC

Florence 

County School

District Three

LEA 2 Yes 6 Nof 44% 53% 2% 1% 0% 63%

SC

South 

Carolina 

Department of 

Education

SEA 1 Yes 23 Nog 41% 55% 2% 1% 1% 68%

SD

South Dakota 

Department of 

Education

SEA 2 No 47 Noh 31% 0% 1% 0% 68% 74%

TN

New Leaders, 

Inc. (Memphis 

City Schools)

Nonprofit 

organization 1 Yes 164 No 7% 86% 6% 1% 0% 69%

TX Dallas ISD LEA 1 Yes 220 Yes 5% 28% 67% 1% 0% 86%

TX Houston ISD LEA 1 Yes 109 Yes 8% 28% 61% 3% 0% 63%

TX

School of 

Excellence in 

Education

Charter 

school 2 Yes 8 Yes 7% 45% 47% 0% 0% 86%

TX University of 

Texas System

Nonprofit 

organization 2 Yes 27 No 30% 27% 38% 4% 0% 58%

DC

New Leaders, 

Inc. (D.C. 

Public 

Schools)

Nonprofit 

organization 1 No 9 Yes 8% 78% 12% 2% 0% 70%

Source: NCES CCD, Documents provided by grantee to the U.S. Department of Education.

 

f

 This grant includes the remaining four schools in a district (Florence 3) that was included in the grant given to the South Carolina Department of Education, 

extending the PFP program to all schools in the district. It also includes two additional schools, each one in a separate district. 

g

 This grantee is a statewide grantee that has implemented a pay-for-performance program in schools in six districts across the state. In one district, all schools 

are included, but for the remaining five districts, only a select number of schools are included. 

h

 This statewide grantee includes all schools in nine districts, and then all but one school in a 10th district. 
89

Appendix C1. Components of teacher performance pay projects 

State

Grantee 

Name

Eligibility and 

Participation Awards for Student Achievement

Awards Are Based In Part on Evaluations

a

Hard-to-Staff

Supports 

for 

Improving 

Practice

Tournament

b

Number of Teachers in Participating 

Schools

Number of Eligible Teachers

Number of Participating Teachers

Student Achievement 

Measures Award Levels Untested Teachers are. . .

Hard-to-Staff School Bonuses

Hard-to-Staff Subject Bonuses

Bonuses for Attending PD

Bonuses for Additional Teacher Roles

VAMc

Growth

Status

d

Teacher-Developed Goals

e

Teacher-Level Awards

Group- or School-level Awards

Both Teacher- and Group/SchoolLevel Awards

Excluded from PFP

Eligible for the Same Maximum 

Amount Based on Adjustment of 

Award Formula

Not Eligible for All Components

Treated as a Tested Teachers

AK

Chugach 

School 

District

107 107 107 No Yes No Yes No Yes No n.a. – All teachers awarded either at the 

group or school level. Yes No No Yes Yes No

AZ

Amphitheater 

Unified 

School 

District

530 530 508 Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No

 

a

 Some grantees used evaluation results as a prerequisite for individuals in a school to be eligible for an award. Prerequisite measures were not counted here, 

only items that directly impacted the variation in award payouts. 

b

 For an explanation of tournaments, please see the glossary in Appendix F. 

c

 In categorizing measures as a growth measure vs. VAM measure, we deferred to state and grantee self-description of the measures. 

d

 Some grantees used status measures like AYP as a prerequisite for individuals in a school to be eligible for an award. Prerequisite measures were not counted 

here, only items that directly impacted the variation in achievement payouts. 

e

 These goals can be linked to VAM, Growth, or Status models, but we define them separately as they can be less objective than a standard formula used across 

all administrators and teachers. 
90

State

Grantee 

Name

Eligibility and 

Participation Awards for Student Achievement

Awards Are Based In Part on Evaluations

a

Hard-to-Staff

Supports 

for 

Improving 

Practice

Tournament

b

Number of Teachers in Participating 

Schools

Number of Eligible Teachers

Number of Participating Teachers

Student Achievement 

Measures Award Levels Untested Teachers are. . .

Hard-to-Staff School Bonuses

Hard-to-Staff Subject Bonuses

Bonuses for Attending PD

Bonuses for Additional Teacher Roles

VAMc

Growth

Status

d

Teacher-Developed Goals

e

Teacher-Level Awards

Group- or School-level Awards

Both Teacher- and Group/SchoolLevel Awards

Excluded from PFP

Eligible for the Same Maximum 

Amount Based on Adjustment of 

Award Formula

Not Eligible for All Components

Treated as a Tested Teachers

CA

Lynwood 

Unified 

School 

District

517 517 249 No Yes Yes No No Yes No n.a. – All teachers awarded either at the 

group or school level.f

No No Yes No Yes No

CA

Mare Island 

Technology 

Academyg

CO Eagle County 

Schools 549 549 549 Yes Yes No No No Yes No n.a. – All teachers awarded either at the 

group or school level. Yes Yes Yes No Yes No

CO

Harrison 

School 

District 2

655 655 655 No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No No Yes Yes No No No No No

CO

School 

District of 

Denverh

 

f

 Although this grantee awards at the group or school-level only, untested teachers are eligible for a lower maximum amount than tested subject teachers. 

g

 Mare Island Technology Academy decided not to participate before beginning program implementation, therefore, no data is reported. 

h

 The Denver project is focused only at principals and is not described in this table. 
91

State

Grantee 

Name

Eligibility and 

Participation Awards for Student Achievement

Awards Are Based In Part on Evaluationsa

Hard-to-Staff

Supports 

for 

Improving 

Practice

Tournamentb

Number of Teachers in Participating 

Schools

Number of Eligible Teachers

Number of Participating Teachers

Student Achievement 

Measures Award Levels Untested Teachers are. . .

Hard-to-Staff School Bonuses

Hard-to-Staff Subject Bonuses

Bonuses for Attending PD

Bonuses for Additional Teacher Roles

VAMc

Growth

Statusd

Teacher-Developed Goalse

Teacher-Level Awards

Group- or School-level Awards

Both Teacher- and Group/SchoolLevel Awards

Excluded from PFP

Eligible for the Same Maximum 

Amount Based on Adjustment of 

Award Formula

Not Eligible for All Components

Treated as a Tested Teachers

CO Weld County 

Schools 159 159 159 No Yes No Yes No Yes No n.a. 

– All teachers awarded either at the 

group or school level. No No No Yes Yes No

FL

Hillsborough 

County 

Schools

6,037 6,037 6,037 No Yes No No Yes No No No No No Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes

FL

School Board 

of Miami-

Dade County

3,500 3,500 350 n.a.– No awards based on student achievement. No Yes No Yes Yes No

FL

School Board 

of Orange 

County

630 630 475 No Yes No No Yes No No No No No Yes No No No No No No

IL

Chicago 

Public 

Schools

580 580 580 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes No No No Yes Yes

LA

National 

Institute for 

Excellence in 

Teaching

340 340 340 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes No No No Yes Yes

MA

Edward 

Brooke 

Charter 

School

35 35 35 No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No Yes No No No
92

State

Grantee 

Name

Eligibility and 

Participation Awards for Student Achievement

Awards Are Based In Part on Evaluations

a

Hard-to-Staff

Supports 

for 

Improving 

Practice

Tournament

b

Number of Teachers in Participating 

Schools

Number of Eligible Teachers

Number of Participating Teachers

Student Achievement 

Measures Award Levels Untested Teachers are. . .

Hard-to-Staff School Bonuses

Hard-to-Staff Subject Bonuses

Bonuses for Attending PD

Bonuses for Additional Teacher Roles

VAMc

Growth

Status

d

Teacher-Developed Goals

e

Teacher-Level Awards

Group- or School-level Awards

Both Teacher- and Group/SchoolLevel Awards

Excluded from PFP

Eligible for the Same Maximum 

Amount Based on Adjustment of 

Award Formula

Not Eligible for All Components

Treated as a Tested Teachers

MD

Prince 

George’s 

County 

Schools

999 999 369 Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes No

Multi New Leaders, 

Inc. 4,361 4,361 4,361 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No No No No Yes

NC

CharlotteMecklenburg 

Schools

998 998 998 Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No No No No Yes

NC

Cumberland 

County 

Schools

380 171 171 No Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No No No No No Yes No

NC

Guilford 

County 

Schools

357 141 141 Yes No No No Yes No No Yes No No No No Yes Yes Yes No No

NM

Northern New 

Mexico 

Network

336 336 309 No Yes No No No Yesi No n.a. – All teachers awarded either at the 

group or school level. Yes No Yes No Yes Yes

 

i

 During the phone interviews, this grantee discussed a plan to implement teacher-level awards in the 2009 10 school year. However, as we did not collect 

payout data on 2009 10 awards, we could not confirm whether or not teachers received any teacher-level awards. 
93

State

Grantee 

Name

Eligibility and 

Participation Awards for Student Achievement

Awards Are Based In Part on Evaluations

a

Hard-to-Staff

Supports 

for 

Improving 

Practice

Tournament

b

Number of Teachers in Participating 

Schools

Number of Eligible Teachers

Number of Participating Teachers

Student Achievement 

Measures Award Levels Untested Teachers are. . .

Hard-to-Staff School Bonuses

Hard-to-Staff Subject Bonuses

Bonuses for Attending PD

Bonuses for Additional Teacher Roles

VAMc

Growth

Status

d

Teacher-Developed Goals

e

Teacher-Level Awards

Group- or School-level Awards

Both Teacher- and Group/SchoolLevel Awards

Excluded from PFP

Eligible for the Same Maximum 

Amount Based on Adjustment of 

Award Formula

Not Eligible for All Components

Treated as a Tested Teachers

NY

Center for 

Educational 

Change –

Public 

Education 

Association

257 257 256 No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Unclearj Unclear Unclear Unclear Yes No No Yes Yes Yes

OH

Ohio 

Department 

of Educationk

6,148 6,148 6,148 Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes Yes No No Yes Yes

OK Beggs School 

District 90 90 90 No Yes No No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No No Yes Yes No

PA

School 

District of 

Philadelphia

402 402 402 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes No No No Yes Yes

PA

School 

District of 

Pittsburghl

 

j

 Although his grantee provides a framework for the 10 participating charter schools with the different components that teachers and principals can be rewarded 

for, individual schools have autonomy to design their performance pay projects, e.g. which components to award teachers and at what levels. Consequently, 

we were not able to determine which award levels they used. 

k

 Ohio contains four separate district grantees that pay for student achievement in different ways. Two use VAM, one uses growth, and one uses a combination 

of growth and status. In classifying this grantee, if these categories applied to any of these four districts, they were counted as a “Yes”. 
94

State

Grantee 

Name

Eligibility and 

Participation Awards for Student Achievement

Awards Are Based In Part on Evaluations

a

Hard-to-Staff

Supports 

for 

Improving 

Practice

Tournament

b

Number of Teachers in Participating 

Schools

Number of Eligible Teachers

Number of Participating Teachers

Student Achievement 

Measures Award Levels Untested Teachers are. . .

Hard-to-Staff School Bonuses

Hard-to-Staff Subject Bonuses

Bonuses for Attending PD

Bonuses for Additional Teacher Roles

VAMc

Growth

Status

d

Teacher-Developed Goals

e

Teacher-Level Awards

Group- or School-level Awards

Both Teacher- and Group/SchoolLevel Awards

Excluded from PFP

Eligible for the Same Maximum 

Amount Based on Adjustment of 

Award Formula

Not Eligible for All Components

Treated as a Tested Teachers

SC

Florence 

County 

School 

District Three

208 208 208 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes No No No Yes Yes

SC

South 

Carolina 

Department 

of Education

803 803 803 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes No No No Yes Yes

SD

South Dakota 

Department 

of Education

696 696 696 Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No

TN

New Leaders, 

Inc. 

(Memphis 

City Schools)

5,103 5,103 5,103 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No No No No Yes

TX Dallas ISD 11,151 11,151 7,607 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No Yes No No No Yes

TX Houston ISD 3,982 3,982 3,976 Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No No No No No No No

TX

School of 

Excellence in 

Education

177 177 177 No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No

 

l

 The Pittsburgh project is focused only at principals and is not described in this table. 
95

State

Grantee 

Name

Eligibility and 

Participation Awards for Student Achievement

Awards Are Based In Part on Evaluations

a

Hard-to-Staff

Supports 

for 

Improving 

Practice

Tournament

b

Number of Teachers in Participating 

Schools

Number of Eligible Teachers

Number of Participating Teachers

Student Achievement 

Measures Award Levels Untested Teachers are. . .

Hard-to-Staff School Bonuses

Hard-to-Staff Subject Bonuses

Bonuses for Attending PD

Bonuses for Additional Teacher Roles

VAMc

Growth

Status

d

Teacher-Developed Goals

e

Teacher-Level Awards

Group- or School-level Awards

Both Teacher- and Group/SchoolLevel Awards

Excluded from PFP

Eligible for the Same Maximum 

Amount Based on Adjustment of 

Award Formula

Not Eligible for All Components

Treated as a Tested Teachers

TX

University of 

Texas 

System

1,600 1,600 1,600 Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes

Depends 

on school 

discretionm

Depends 

on school 

discretion

No Yes Yes

DC

New Leaders, 

Inc. 

(D.C. Public 

Schools)

2,987 2,987 2,987 Yes No Yes No No Yes No n.a. – All teachers awarded either at the 

group or school level. No No No No No Yes

TOTAL 54,674 54,249 46,446 18n 15 10 5 24 27 21 2 7 10 4 16 5 8 10 21 15

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data, Interviews with Grantees, Documents provided by project staff 

 

m

 Recruitment incentives are distributed to each participating campus, and the school has discretion over how to distribute these awards. 

n

 When looking at grantee totals for the types of student achievement measures, a careful reader may notice these numbers differ from those presented in an 

earlier exhibit. The differences arise because these counts are not mutually exclusive whereas the categories in the text are mutually exclusive: VAM only, 

Growth only, etc. Both sets of numbers are correct. 
96

Appendix C2. Components of principal performance pay projects 

State Grantee Name

Number of 

Participating 

Administrators

Student Achievement Measures Awards Are 

Based In Part 

on Evaluations

Hard-to-Staff 

School Bonuses

Bonuses for 

VAMa Growth Status Attending PD

AK Chugach School District 11 No Yes No Yes No No

AZ Amphitheater Unified School 

District 20 Yes No No No No Yes

CA Lynwood Unified School District 25 No Yes No Yes No Yes

CA Mare Island Technology 

Academyb No

CO Eagle County Schools 26 Yes Yes No Yes Yes No

CO Harrison School District 2c

50 No Yes Yes Yes No No

CO School District of Denver 212 No Yes No Yes Yes No

CO Weld County Schools 10 No Yes No No No No

FL Hillsborough County Schools 292 No Yes No Yes No Yes

FL School Board of Miami-Dade 

County 70 No Yes No No No No

FL School Board of Orange County 33 No Yes No No No No

IL Chicago Public Schools 59 Yes No No Yes No No

LA National Institute for Excellence 22 Yes No No Yes No No

 

a

 In categorizing measures as a growth measure vs. VAM measure, we deferred to state and grantee self-description of the measures. 

b

 Mare Island Technology Academy decided not to participate before beginning program implementation, therefore, no data is reported. 

c

 Harrison was in the process of changing their principal program to match their new teacher PFP. The counts in this appendix reflect the original TIF program 

because the new program was still in development at the time of our data collection. 
97

State Grantee Name

Number of 

Participating 

Administrators

Student Achievement Measures Awards Are 

Based In Part 

on Evaluations

Hard-to-Staff 

School Bonuses

Bonuses for 

VAMa Growth Status Attending PD

in Teaching

MA Edward Brooke Charter School 2 No Yes No Yes No No

MD Prince George’s County 

Schools 35 No Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Multi New Leaders, Inc. 325 Yes No No No No No

NC Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools 22 Yes No No No No No

NC Cumberland County Schools 15 No Yes No Yes No No

NC Guilford County Schools 8 No Yes No No Yes No

NM Northern New Mexico Network 21 No Yes No Yes No No

NY Center for Educational Change 

– Public Education Association 25 No Yes Yes No No Yes

OH Ohio Dept. of Educationd

100 Yes Yes Yes No No No

OK Beggs School District 6 No Yes No No No Yes

PA School District of Philadelphia 68 Yes No No Yes No No

PA School District of Pittsburgh 14 Yes No No Yes No No

SC Florence County School District 

Three 11 Yes No Yes Yes No No

SC South Carolina Department of 

Education 51 Yes No No Yes No No

 

d

 Ohio contains four separate district grantees that award principals for student achievement in different ways. Two use VAM, one uses growth, and one uses a 

combination of growth and status. In classifying this grantee, if these categories applied to any of these four districts, they were counted as a “Yes”. 
98

State Grantee Name

Number of 

Participating 

Administrators

Student Achievement Measures Awards Are 

Based In Part 

on Evaluations

Hard-to-Staff 

School Bonuses

Bonuses for 

VAMa Growth Status Attending PD

SD South Dakota Department of 

Education 38 Yes No Yes No No Yes

TN New Leaders, Inc. 

(Memphis City Schools) 246 Yes No No No No No

TX Dallas ISD 512 Yes No Yes No Yes No

TX Houston ISD 176 Yes No Yes No No No

TX School of Excellence in 

Education 10 No No Yes Yes No No

TX University of Texas System 47 Yes No No Yes Yes No

DC New Leaders, Inc. 

(D.C. Public Schools) 222 Yes No Yes No No No

TOTAL 2,784 17 17 10 18 5 7

Source: Grantee-submitted payout data, Interviews with grantees, Documents provided by project staff 
99

Appendix D1. Payout awards for administrators – data by quartile 

Grantee

Quartile Based on Total Amount of Payout

1st Quartile Averages 2nd Quartile Averages 3rd Quartile Averages 4th Quartile Averages

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

1 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $506 0.5%

2 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $2,166 2.5%

3 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $2,314 2.8%

4 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $737 0.8% $1,538 1.7%

5 $0 0.0% $338 0.4% $1,249 1.6% $2,048 2.6%

6 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $97 0.1% $4,062 5.0%

7 $0 0.0% $533 0.7% $1,333 1.7% $2,250 2.9%

8 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $444 0.5% $4,857 5.3%

9 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $5,206 5.6%

10 $0 0.0% $231 0.3% $1,538 2.0% $4,333 5.6%

11 $400 0.6% $1,408 2.0% $2,000 2.8% $3,125 4.4%

12 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $23 0.0% $6,993 8.9%

13 $0 0.0% $2,400 3.6% $2,650 3.9% $2,650 3.9%

14 $442 0.4% $1,975 1.6% $2,667 2.2% $3,704 3.1%

15 $875 1.0% $1,333 1.5% $2,250 2.4% $5,292 5.8%

16 $940 1.1% $2,032 2.4% $3,148 3.7% $4,726 5.5%
100

Grantee

Quartile Based on Total Amount of Payout

1st Quartile Averages 2nd Quartile Averages 3rd Quartile Averages 4th Quartile Averages

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

17 $0 0.0% $3,039 4.2% $4,254 5.9% $5,248 7.3%

18 $1,000 1.5% $1,375 2.0% $5,000 7.3% $5,000 7.3%

19 $375 0.7% $1,100 2.1% $4,678 8.7% $8,936 16.7%

20 $893 1.2% $2,567 3.3% $4,558 5.9% $9,359 12.1%

21 $1,591 1.5% $3,297 3.2% $4,714 4.6% $7,874 7.6%

22 $1,047 1.4% $2,884 3.8% $5,053 6.7% $9,383 12.4%

23 $2,153 3.4% $4,429 6.9% $6,840 10.6% $6,840 10.6%

24 $3,250 3.9% $4,042 4.9% $5,500 6.6% $8,700 10.5%

25 $3,668 3.5% $4,687 4.4% $5,618 5.3% $7,228 6.8%

26 $3,000 2.9% $5,500 5.4% $6,000 5.8% $7,000 6.8%

27 $2,950 2.7% $4,329 4.0% $6,743 6.2% $8,480 7.9%

28 $4,200 6.1% $4,277 6.2% $5,443 7.9% $8,489 12.3%

29 $7,000 7.1% $7,000 7.1% $7,365 7.5% $7,365 7.5%

30 $5,193 4.9% $6,757 6.4% $7,950 7.6% $9,524 9.1%

31 $6,288 8.5% $8,202 11.1% $9,024 12.2% $9,828 13.3%

32 $5,000 5.7% $6,250 7.2% $10,000 11.4% $13,333 15.3%

33 $2,899 3.5% $7,088 8.7% $12,374 15.1% $18,889 23.1%

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data (Note: Grantee identification numbers do not correspond with numbers used in teacher payout exhibits but match appendix D2)
101

Appendix D2. Payout awards for administrators—minimum, maximum, averages across projects, and win rate 

Grantee 

Minimum Payout (not including $0’s) Maximum Payout Average Award (all participants) Average Award (Award Winners) Percentage of 

Part. Winning 

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Awards

1 $800 0.8% $1,000 1.0% $123 0.1% $860 0.9% 14.0%

2 $3,150 3.7% $10,000 11.6% $537 0.6% $8,511 9.9% 6.0%

3 $2,500 3.0% $10,000 12.2% $574 0.7% $7,056 8.6% 8.0%

4 $500 0.5% $2,000 2.2% $584 0.6% $1,270 1.4% 46.0%

5 $15 0.0% $2,210 2.8% $886 1.1% $1,107 1.4% 80.0%

6 $3,557 4.4% $7,248 8.9% $1,054 1.3% $4,049 5.0% 26.0%

7 $800 1.0% $3,400 4.4% $1,123 1.5% $1,544 2.0% 73.0%

8 $4,000 4.4% $5,000 5.5% $1,152 1.3% $4,750 5.2% 24.0%

9 $1,667 1.8% $12,000 12.8% $1,282 1.4% $6,216 6.6% 21.0%

10 $1,000 1.3% $5,000 6.5% $1,500 1.9% $2,679 3.5% 56.0%

11 $300 0.4% $4,000 5.7% $1,762 2.5% $1,882 2.7% 94.0%

12 $600 0.8% $20,800 26.4% $1,768 2.2% $6,754 8.6% 26.0%

13 $2,400 3.6% $2,650 3.9% $2,125 3.2% $2,550 3.8% 83.0%

14 $500 0.4% $4,375 3.6% $2,227 1.8% $2,479 2.1% 90.0%

15 $750 0.8% $8,875 9.7% $2,580 2.8% $2,580 2.8% 100.0%

16 $674 0.8% $6,241 7.2% $2,702 3.1% $2,702 3.1% 100.0%

17 $2,642 3.7% $6,054 8.4% $3,083 4.3% $4,317 6.0% 71.0%
102

Grantee 

Minimum Payout (not including $0’s) Maximum Payout Average Award (all participants) Average Award (Award Winners) Percentage of 

Part. Winning 

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Awards

18 $1,000 1.5% $5,000 7.3% $3,233 4.8% $3,233 4.8% 100.0%

19 $350 0.7% $10,959 20.4% $3,595 6.7% $3,595 6.7% 100.0%

20 $632 0.8% $13,364 17.3% $4,412 5.7% $4,688 6.1% 94.0%

21 $420 0.4% $13,270 12.8% $4,461 4.3% $4,461 4.3% 100.0%

22 $206 0.3% $14,530 19.2% $4,639 6.1% $4,639 6.1% 100.0%

23 $1,140 1.8% $6,840 10.6% $5,096 7.9% $5,096 7.9% 100.0%

24 $2,500 3.0% $10,125 12.2% $5,318 6.4% $5,318 6.4% 100.0%

25 $2,944 2.8% $9,120 8.6% $5,347 5.1% $5,347 5.1% 100.0%

26 $3,000 2.9% $7,000 6.8% $5,429 5.3% $5,429 5.3% 100.0%

27 $2,400 2.2% $8,700 8.1% $5,504 5.1% $5,504 5.1% 100.0%

28 $4,200 6.1% $15,830 22.9% $5,535 8.0% $5,535 8.0% 100.0%

29 $7,000 7.1% $7,365 7.5% $7,183 7.3% $7,183 7.3% 100.0%

30 $3,256 3.1% $12,678 12.1% $7,269 6.9% $7,269 6.9% 100.0%

31 $3,208 4.3% $10,000 13.5% $8,512 11.5% $8,512 11.5% 100.0%

32 $5,000 5.7% $15,000 17.2% $9,688 11.1% $9,688 11.1% 100.0%

33 $1,688 2.1% $27,500 33.6% $10,388 12.7% $11,411 14.0% 91.0%

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data (Note: Grantee identification numbers do not correspond with numbers used in teacher payout exhibits but match appendix D1)
103

Appendix D3. Payout awards for teachers—data by quartile 

Grantee 

Quartile Based on Total Amount of Payout

1st Quartile Averages 2nd Quartile Averages 3rd Quartile Averages 4th Quartile Averages

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

1 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $804 1.6%

2 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $1,160 2.2%

3 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $1,193 2.1%

4 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $1,768 3.3%

5 $250 0.7% $250 0.7% $392 1.1% $1,142 3.3%

6 $0 0.0% $245 0.6% $744 1.7% $2,021 4.7%

7 $0 0.0% $170 0.4% $852 2.1% $2,824 7.0%

8 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $303 0.6% $3,558 7.0%

9 $145 0.3% $500 1.0% $531 1.1% $3,089 6.2%

10 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $1,433 3.8% $3,440 9.1%

11 $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $783 1.7% $4,155 9.2%

12 $505 1.1% $1,017 2.1% $1,323 2.8% $3,854 8.1%

13 $92 0.2% $1,316 3.1% $2,500 5.9% $6,400 15.1%

14 $914 1.4% $1,764 2.7% $2,285 3.5% $5,554 8.5%

15 $1,340 2.4% $2,088 3.7% $3,162 5.6% $4,436 7.9%

16 $382 0.8% $1,664 3.5% $3,294 6.9% $6,483 13.5%
104

Grantee 

Quartile Based on Total Amount of Payout

1st Quartile Averages 2nd Quartile Averages 3rd Quartile Averages 4th Quartile Averages

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

17 $807 1.7% $1,482 3.2% $2,182 4.7% $8,416 18.1%

18 $1,091 2.3% $2,000 4.2% $2,716 5.7% $7,484 15.8%

19 $709 1.0% $1,483 2.0% $2,577 3.5% $8,924 12.0%

20 $1,966 4.2% $4,000 8.4% $4,000 8.4% $4,000 8.4%

21 $1,378 3.1% $2,229 5.0% $2,926 6.5% $7,789 17.3%

22 $1,773 4.6% $2,980 7.7% $4,406 11.4% $5,613 14.5%

23 $2,341 5.1% $3,886 8.5% $4,254 9.3% $4,671 10.2%

24 $2,177 5.0% $2,771 6.3% $3,392 7.7% $7,505 17.1%

25 $2,454 4.3% $3,686 6.5% $4,394 7.7% $5,660 10.0%

26 $2,361 5.2% $2,500 5.5% $2,891 6.4% $8,967 19.7%

27 $683 2.3% $1,879 6.2% $4,850 16.0% $9,985 33.0%

28 $3,033 4.4% $4,374 6.3% $5,005 7.3% $6,473 9.4%

29 $2,321 4.8% $3,691 7.6% $5,100 10.4% $8,304 17.0%

30 $1,754 3.0% $3,230 5.5% $7,204 12.3% $14,088 24.1%

31 $6,058 16.2% $8,637 23.1% $9,329 25.0% $9,832 26.3%

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data (Note: Grantee identification numbers do not correspond with numbers used in administrator payout exhibits but match appendix D4)
105

Appendix D4. Payout awards for teachers – minimum, maximum, averages across projects, and win rate 

Grantee 

Minimum Payout (not including $0’s) Maximum Payout Average Award (all participants) Average Award (Award Winners) Percentage of 

Part. Winning 

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Awards

1 1,000 1.9% 2,500 4.8% 201 0.4% 2,453 4.8% 8.0%

2 167 0.3% 12,961 24.1% 290 0.5% 1,519 2.8% 19.0%

3 600 1.1% 4,000 7.1% 298 0.5% 3,105 5.5% 10.0%

4 200 0.4% 8,000 14.8% 442 0.8% 7,027 13.0% 6.0%

5 250 0.7% 2,775 8.0% 495 1.4% 495 1.4% 100.0%

6 45 0.1% 2,375 5.6% 757 1.8% 1,136 2.7% 67.0%

7 400 1.0% 10,097 25.0% 963 2.4% 1,643 4.1% 59.0%

8 300 0.6% 10,000 19.6% 965 1.9% 2,656 5.2% 36.0%

9 100 0.2% 5,500 11.1% 1,063 2.1% 1,063 2.1% 100.0%

10 500 1.3% 8,000 21.2% 1,202 3.2% 2,679 7.1% 45.0%

11 2,477 5.5% 6,168 13.6% 1,234 2.7% 3,751 8.3% 33.0%

12 356 0.7% 11,750 24.8% 1,659 3.5% 1,718 3.6% 97.0%

13 100 0.2% 14,755 34.7% 2,574 6.1% 3,178 7.5% 81.0%

14 187 0.3% 11,530 17.7% 2,626 4.0% 2,626 4.0% 100.0%

15 1,000 1.8% 8,000 14.2% 2,762 4.9% 2,762 4.9% 100.0%

16 100 0.2% 10,890 22.7% 2,957 6.2% 3,200 6.7% 92.0%

17 66 0.1% 23,421 50.3% 3,236 7.0% 3,253 7.0% 99.0%
106

Grantee 

Minimum Payout (not including $0’s) Maximum Payout Average Award (all participants) Average Award (Award Winners) Percentage of 

Part. Winning 

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Awards

18 $165 0.3% $14,211 30.0% $3,325 7.0% $3,371 7.1% 99.0%

19 $50 0.1% $19,591 26.3% $3,437 4.6% $3,522 4.7% 98.0%

20 $1,000 2.1% $4,000 8.4% $3,495 7.4% $3,790 8.0% 92.0%

21 $452 1.0% $15,382 34.3% $3,579 8.0% $3,579 8.0% 100.0%

22 $428 1.1% $11,460 29.6% $3,696 9.6% $3,706 9.6% 100.0%

23 $815 1.8% $9,254 20.2% $3,787 8.3% $3,817 8.3% 99.0%

24 $1,125 2.6% $13,500 30.8% $3,978 9.1% $3,978 9.1% 100.0%

25 $788 1.4% $7,338 12.9% $4,061 7.2% $4,061 7.2% 100.0%

26 $2,500 5.5% $18,000 39.6% $4,192 9.2% $4,250 9.4% 99.0%

27 $56 0.2% $19,873 65.7% $4,311 14.2% $4,311 14.2% 100.0%

28 $1,230 1.8% $10,131 14.7% $4,734 6.9% $4,734 6.9% 100.0%

29 $1,062 2.2% $12,327 25.2% $4,926 10.1% $4,926 10.1% 100.0%

30 $1,000 1.7% $20,100 34.4% $6,610 11.3% $6,610 11.3% 100.0%

31 $2,500 6.7% $10,000 26.8% $8,463 22.7% $8,480 22.7% 100.0%

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data (Note: Grantee identification numbers do not correspond with numbers used in administrator payout exhibits but match appendix D3)
107

Appendix D4. Payout awards for administrators and teachers – data by quartile, minimum, maximum, averages across projects, 

and win rate 

Administrators 

(Corresponds to Appendix D1)

Quartile Based on Total Amount of Payout

1st Quartile Averages 2nd Quartile Averages 3rd Quartile Averages 4th Quartile Averages

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

Average $1,611 1.9% $2,639 3.1% $3,917 4.8% $6,280 7.7%

Median $875 1.0% $2,032 2.4% $4,254 4.6% $5,292 6.8%

Minimum $0 0.0% - 0.0% - 0.0% $506 0.5%

Maximum $7,000 8.5% $8,202 11.1% $12,374 15.1% $18,889 23.1%

 (Corresponds to Appendix D2)

Minimum Payout (not including $0’s) Maximum Payout Average Award (all participants) Average Award (Award Winners)

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

Average $1,964 2.3% $9,034 11.0% $3,657 4.4% $4,794 5.8%

Median $1,667 1.8% $8,700 8.9% $3,083 4.3% $4,688 5.3%

Minimum $15 0.0% $1,000 1.0% $123 0.1% $860 0.9%

Maximum $7,000 7.1% $27,500 33.6% $10,388 12.7% $11,411 14.0%
108

Teachers 

(Corresponds to Appendix D3)

Quartile Based on Total Amount of Payout

1st Quartile Averages 2nd Quartile Averages 3rd Quartile Averages 4th Quartile Averages

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

Average $1,114 2.4% $1,866 4.0% $2,672 5.8% $5,471 11.7%

Median $709 1.4% $1,664 3.2% $2,577 5.6% $5,554 9.4%

Minimum $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $0 0.0% $804 1.6%

Maximum $6,058 16.2% $8,637 23.1% $9,329 25.0% $14,088 33.0%

(Corresponds to Appendix D4)

Minimum Payout (not including $0’s) Maximum Payout Average Award (all participants) Average Award (Award Winners)

Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary Dollars Percent of Avg. Salary

Average $678 1.4% $10,900 23.2% $2,784 6.0% $3,465 7.3%

Median $428 1.0% $10,131 22.7% $2,957 6.1% $3,371 7.1%

Minimum $45 0.1% $2,375 4.8% $201 0.4% $495 1.4%

Maximum $2,500 6.7% $23,421 65.7% $8,463 22.7% $8,480 22.7%

Exhibit Reads: In the first quartile of awards (as determined by total award size), the average project awarded $1,611 to administrators. Across grantees, on average, administrators in 

the first quartile of total payouts were awarded an incentive payout equal to 1.9% of the regional average administrative salary. 

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data 
109

Appendix D6. Administrator payout awards by component 

Student 

Achievement

Student 

Achievement Evaluations Evaluations

Additional 

Roles

Additional 

Roles

Hard to 

Staff School

Hard to Staff 

School Othera Otherb Total Payout

Grantee Dollars Percent of 

Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars

1 $1,227,188 56% 224,768 10% $132,750 6% $617,625 28% $2,500 0% $2,204,830

2 $775,100 86% - - - - $130,000 14% $48,750 5% $953,850

3 $816,464 100% - - - - - - $4,500 1% $820,964

4 $208,250 50% - - $208,250 50% - - $8,165 2% $424,665

5 $147,633 48% $160,054 52% - - - - - - $307,687

6 $208,137 69% $95,230 31% - - - - - - $303,367

7 $225,005 100% - - - - - - - - $225,005

8 $149,847 92% - - $12,269 8% - - - - $162,116

9 $113,829 74% - - $41,040 26% - - - - $154,869

10 $70,563 50% - - $70,563 50% - - - - $141,125

11 $37,563 29% $93,813 71% - - - - - - $131,375

12 $73,345 60% - - $48,150 40% - - - - $121,495

13 $59,575 50% - - $59,575 50% - - - - $119,150

 

a

 The “other” category for administrators includes payouts based on a variety of categories including attending professional development or receiving various 

certifications/credentials. 

b

 The “other” category for administrators includes payouts based on a variety of categories including attending professional development or receiving various 

certifications/credentials. 
110

Student 

Achievement

Student 

Achievement Evaluations Evaluations

Additional 

Roles

Additional 

Roles

Hard to 

Staff School

Hard to Staff 

School Othera Otherb Total Payout

Grantee Dollars Percent of 

Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars

14 $78,250 67% $38,750 33% - - - - - - $117,000

15 $111,000 96% - - $5,000 4% - - - - $116,000

16 $103,600 91% - - - - $10,000 9% - - $113,600

17 $52,755 50% $52,686 50% - - - - $21,600 17% $127,041

18 $82,799 100% - - - - - - - - $82,799

19 $25,000 32% - - - - $52,500 68% - - $77,500

20 $49,000 64% $27,000 36% - - - - - - $76,000

21 $75,000 100% - - - - - - - - $75,000

22 $39,311 56% $30,941 44% - - - - - - $70,252

23 $33,432 52% $22,321 34% $9,000 14% - - - - $64,753

24 $58,417 100% - - - - - - $81,700 58% $140,117

25 $34,000 70% $14,500 30% - - - - - - $48,500

26 $38,000 100% - - - - - - $19,616 34% $57,616

27 $23,776 66% $5,150 14% $1,528 4% - - - - $30,455

28 $10,500 37% $13,125 46% $2,250 8% - - $5,500 18% $31,375

29 $14,365 100% - - - - - - - - $14,365

30 $11,350 92% $1,000 8% - - - - $38,760 76% $51,110
111

Student 

Achievement

Student 

Achievement Evaluations Evaluations

Additional 

Roles

Additional 

Roles

Hard to 

Staff School

Hard to Staff 

School Otherc Otherd Total Payout

Grantee Dollars Percent of 

Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars

31 $8,842 100% - - $15 0% - - - - $8,857

32 $8,600 100% - - - - - - - - $8,600

33 $750 9% - - $7,500 91% - - - - $8,250

Exhibit Reads: Grantee 1 paid administrators $1,227,188 for award components based directly on student achievement. This represented 56 percent of the total amount of incentive 

awards paid based on performance in the 2008 09 school year. 

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data 

Note: Grantee identification numbers do not correspond with numbers used in previous administrator payout appendixes. 

 

c

 The “other” category for administrators includes payouts based on a variety of categories including attending professional development or receiving various 

certifications/credentials. 

d

 The “other” category for administrators includes payouts based on a variety of categories including attending professional development or receiving various 

certifications/credentials. 
112

Appendix D7. Teacher payout awards by component 

Student 

Achievement

Student 

Achievement Evaluations Evaluations

Additional 

Roles

Additional 

Roles

Hard to Staff 

Subject/

School

Hard to Staff 

Subject/

School Othera Otherb Total Payout

Grantee Dollars Percent of 

Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total

Dollars Percent of 

Total

Dollars Percent of 

Total

Dollars

1 $11,641,163 99% - - - - - - $117,040 1% $11,758,202

2 $4,746,407 64% $2,700,257 36% - - - - - - $7,446,664

3 $3,802,300 52% - - - - $3,540,000 48% - - $7,342,300

4 $1,275,055 29% $808,219 18% $1,185,831 27% - - $1,174,165 26% $4,443,270

5 $1,114,474 29% $1,363,918 35% $1,365,000 36% - - - - $3,843,392

6 $886,644 30% $1,159,697 39% $890,000 30% - - - - $2,936,340

7 $1,137,374 44% - - $573,796 22% $188,625 7% $713,070 27% $2,612,865

8 $500,173 25% $548,537 28% $945,000 47% - - - - $1,993,711

9 $1,276,067 69% $205,005 11% $279,348 15% $82,460 4% - - $1,842,880

10 $441,580 25% $548,810 31% $741,029 41% $54,695 3% - - $1,786,114

11 $1,660,000 100% - - - - - - - - $1,660,000

12 $1,321,000 100% - - - - - - - - $1,321,000

13 $446,625 34% $489,000 37% $369,000 28% - - - - $1,304,625

14 $1,279,305 100% - - - - - - - - $1,279,305

 

a

 The “other” category for teachers includes payouts based on a variety of categories including attending professional development or receiving various 

certifications/credentials. 

b

 The “other” category for teachers includes payouts based on a variety of categories including attending professional development or receiving various 

certifications/credentials. 
113

Student 

Achievement

Student 

Achievement Evaluations Evaluations

Additional 

Roles

Additional 

Roles

Hard to Staff 

Subject/

School

Hard to Staff 

Subject/

School Othera Otherb Total Payout

Grantee Dollars Percent of 

Total Dollars Percent of Total Dollars Percent of Total

Dollars Percent of 

Total

Dollars Percent of 

Total

Dollars

15 $943,554 78% - - $51,690 4% - - $216,761 18% $1,212,005

16 $606,200 53% - - - - $445,000 39% $86,475 8% $1,137,675

17 $632,398 60% $117,300 11% $306,000 29% - - - - $1,055,698

18 $267,350 27% $147,700 15% $189,500 19% $171,000 17% $215,440 22% $990,990

19 $561,529 59% $364,217 38% $32,300 3% - - - - $958,046

20 $302,869 36% $34,600 4% $411,229 48% $35,557 4% $64,980 8% $849,235

21 $782,500 100% - - - - - - - - $782,500

22 $635,400 85% - - $92,000 12% $21,000 3% - - $748,400

23 $321,525 41% $237,150 30% $106,097 13% - - $121,774 15% $786,546

24 $197,335 31% $63,000 10% - - $180,400 29% $190,150 30% $630,885

25 $120,250 20% - - - - $488,000 79% $8,000 1% $616,250

26 - - - - $337,000 91% - - $35,045 9% $372,045

27 $17,100 5% $223,017 66% $100,000 29% - - - - $340,117

28 $166,000 67% - - $27,000 11% - - $53,500 22% $246,500

29 $161,250 94% - - - - - - $11,175 6% $172,425

30 $112,673 94% - - $7,720 6% - - - - $120,393

31 $32,950 91% - - - - - - $3,161 9% $36,111

Exhibit Reads: Grantee 1 paid administrators $11,641,163 for award components based directly on student achievement. This represented 99% of the total amount of incentive awards 

paid based on performance in the 2008 09 school year. 

Source: Grantee-submitted Payout Data 

Note: Grantee identification numbers do not correspond with numbers used in previous teacher payout appendices.
114
115

Appendix E: Comparison of project requirements across TIF cohorts 

TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)a TIF Cohort 3b

Years Funded Cohort 1 includes 16 awards made in November, 2006

Cohort 2 includes 18 awards made in July, 2007

Cohort 3 includes 62 awards made in September, 2010.

Project Period Up to 60 months Up to 60 months

Program Goals The purpose of the Teacher Incentive Fund, authorized as part of 

the FY 2006 Department of Education Appropriations Act, Public 

Law 109–149, is to support programs that develop and implement 

performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in 

high-need schools. The specific goals of the Teacher Incentive 

Fund include: Improving student achievement by increasing 

teacher and principal effectiveness; reforming teacher and principal 

compensation systems so that teachers and principals are 

rewarded for increases in student achievement; increasing the 

number of effective teachers teaching poor, minority, and 

disadvantaged students in hard-to-staff subjects; and creating 

sustainable performance-based compensation systems.

The purpose of the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) program is to support projects that develop and 

implement performance-based compensation systems (PBCSs) for teachers, principals, and other 

personnel in order to increase educator effectiveness and student achievement, measured in 

significant part by student growth, in high-need schools.

Absolute 

Priorities

Consistent with the program purpose, the grantee must establish a 

system that provides teachers and principals, or principals only, 

serving in high-need schools with differentiated levels of 

compensation based primarily on student achievement gains at the 

school and classroom levels. This performance-based 

compensation system must also (a) consider classroom 

evaluations conducted multiple times during each school year and 

(b) provide educators with incentives to take on additional 

responsibilities and leadership roles.

(1) Differentiated Levels of Compensation for Effective Teachers and Principals: To meet this 

absolute priority, an applicant must demonstrate, in its application, that it will develop and implement 

a PBCS that rewards, at differentiated levels, teachers and principals who demonstrate their 

effectiveness by improving student achievement, as part of the coherent and integrated approach of 

the local education agency (LEA) to strengthening the educator workforce. In determining teacher 

and principal effectiveness as part of the PBCS, the LEA— (a) Must give significant weight to 

student growth, based on objective data on student performance; (b) Must include observationbased assessments of teacher and principal performance at multiple points in the year, carried out 

by evaluators trained in using objective evidence-based rubrics for observation, aligned with 

professional teaching standards; and, if applicable, as part of the LEA’s coherent and integrated 

approach to strengthening the educator workforce; and (c) May include other measures, such as 

evidence of leadership roles, that increase the effectiveness of other teachers in the school or LEA. 

In determining principal effectiveness as part of a PBCS, the LEA must give significant weight to 

student growth and may include supplemental measures such as high school graduation and college 

enrollment rates. In addition, the applicant must demonstrate that the differentiated effectiveness 

incentive payments will provide incentive amounts that are substantial and provide justification for 

the level of incentive amounts chosen. While the Department does not propose a minimum incentive 

 

a

 While there were two separate cohorts awarded in 2006 and 2007, the program requirements were identical and are therefore listed together in this table. 

b

 Cohort 3 included two competitions: the main competition and the evaluation competition. All requirements for the main competition apply to the evaluation 

competition, but the evaluation competition has several additional requirements. Unless otherwise noted, all requirements apply to both competitions. 
116

TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)a TIF Cohort 3b

amount, the Department encourages applicants to be thorough in their explanation of why the 

selected incentive amounts are likely high enough to create change in the behavior of current and 

prospective teachers and principals in order to ultimately improve student outcomes.

(2) Fiscal Sustainability of the Performance-Based Compensation System (PBCS): To meet this 

absolute priority, the applicant must provide, in its application, evidence that: (a) The applicant has 

projected costs associated with the development and implementation of the PBCS, during the 

project period and beyond, and has accepted the responsibility to provide such performance-based 

compensation to teachers, principals, and other personnel (in those sites in which the grantee 

wishes to expand the PBCS to additional staff in its schools) who earn it under the system; and (b) 

The applicant will provide from non-TIF funds over the course of the five-year project period an 

increasing share of performance-based compensation paid to teachers, principals, and other 

personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional staff in its 

schools) in those project years in which the LEA provides such payments as part of its PBCS.

(3) Comprehensive Approaches to the Performance-Based Compensation System (PBCS): To meet 

this absolute priority, the applicant must provide, in its application, evidence that the proposed PBCS 

is aligned with a coherent and integrated strategy for strengthening the educator workforce, 

including in the use of data and evaluations for professional development and retention and tenure 

decisions, in the LEA or LEAs participating in the project, during and after the end of the TIF project 

period.

Competitive 

Priorities

(1) We will award up to an additional 5 points depending on the

extent to which the applicant documents or provides a plan to 

establish ongoing support for and commitment to the performancebased compensation system from a significant proportion of the 

teachers, the principal, and the community, including the applicable 

governing authority or LEA, for each participating high-need 

school.

(2) We will award up to an additional 5 points depending on the 

extent to which the applicant will provide differentiated levels of 

compensation, which may include incentives, to recruit or retain 

effective teachers and principals (as measured by student 

achievement gains) in high-need urban and rural schools, and/or in 

hard-to-staff subject areas such as mathematics and science.

(1) Use of Value-Added Measures of Student Achievement. To meet this competitive preference 

priority, the applicant must demonstrate, in its application, that the proposed PBCS for teachers, 

principals, and other personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to 

additional staff in its schools) will use a value-added measure of the impact on student growthas a 

significant factor in calculating differentiated levels of compensation provided to teachers, principals, 

and other personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional 

staff in its schools). Under this priority, the applicant must also demonstrate that it has a plan to 

ensure that, as part of the PBCS, it has the capacity to (1) implement the proposed value-added 

model (e.g., through robust data systems that collect the necessary data and ensure data quality), 

and (2) clearly explain the chosen value-added model to teachers to enable them to use the data 

generated through the model to improve classroom practices. 

(2) Increased Recruitment and Retention of Effective Teachers to Serve High-Need Students and in 

Hard-to-Staff Subjects and Specialty Areas in High-Need Schools. To meet this competitive 

preference priority, the applicant must demonstrate in its application that its proposed PBCS is 

designed to assist high-need schools to (1) serve high-need students, (2) retain effective teachers in 

teaching positions in hard-to-staff subjects and specialty areas, such as mathematics, science, 

special education, and English language acquisition, and (3) fill vacancies with teachers of those 

subjects or specialty areas who are effective or likely to be effective. The applicant must provide an 

explanation for how it will determine that a teacher filling a vacancy is effective or likely to be 

effective. In addition, applicants must demonstrate, in their applications, the extent to which the 
117

TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)a TIF Cohort 3b

subjects or specialty areas they propose to target are hard-to-staff. Lastly, applicants must 

demonstrate, in their applications that they will implement a process for effectively communicating to 

teachers which of the LEA’s schools are high-need and which subjects and specialty areas are 

considered hard-to-staff.

(3) New Applicants to the Teacher Incentive Fund. To meet this competitive preference priority, an 

applicant must be a new applicant to the TIF program. For the purposes of this priority, a new 

applicant is (1) an eligible entity that has not previously been awarded a grant under the TIF 

program, or (2) a nonprofit organization that previously received funding through TIF, as part of a 

partnership with one or more LEAs or SEAs, but that is applying to work with a different group of 

eligible LEAs or SEAs than it worked with under any previous TIF grant. Under this competitive 

preference priority, a current nonprofit grantee may not propose to use new TIF funds to 

compensate for any activities related to the development and implementation of its PBCS in LEAs 

and high-need schools already served under the current grant. Rather, a nonprofit organization that 

is a current TIF grantee may only use new TIF funds for the costs of implementing the PBCS in highneed schools in the new LEAs or SEAs (including charter schools) that have not previously received 

TIF funds. 

Other 

Application 

Requirements

None Each applicant must describe in its application how its proposed PBCS will provide educators with 

incentives to take on additional responsibilities and leadership roles. 

Core Elements of a PBCS and a Potential Planning Period. Each applicant must either— (a) 

Demonstrate in its application that it has in place the five core elements that follow; or (b) If the 

applicant cannot demonstrate in its application that it has in place each of the five core elements—

(1) Agree, as part of its application, to implement a planning period of up to one year, during which it 

will use its TIF funds to develop the core element or elements it lacks; and (2) Include, in its 

application, a plan for how it will implement the core element or elements it lacks during the planning 

period. 

Core Elements. (a) A plan for effectively communicating to teachers, administrators, other school 

personnel, and the community-at-large the components of its PBCS; (b) The involvement and 

support of teachers, principals, and other personnel (including input from teachers, principals, and 

other personnel in the schools and LEAs to be served by the grant) and the involvement and support 

of unions in participating LEAs (where they are the designated exclusive representatives for the 

purpose of collective bargaining) that is needed to carry out the grant; (c) Rigorous, transparent, and 

fair evaluation systems for teachers and principals that differentiate effectiveness using multiple 

rating categories that take into account student growth as a significant factor, as well as classroom 

observations conducted at least twice during the school year. The evaluation process must: (1) Use 

an objective, evidence-based rubric aligned with professional teaching or leadership standards and 

the LEA’s coherent and integrated approach to strengthening the educator workforce; (2) provide for 

observations of each teacher or principal at least twice during the school year by individuals (who 

may include peer reviewers) who are provided specialized training; (3) incorporate the collection and 

evaluation of additional forms of evidence; and (4) ensure a high degree of interrater reliability (i.e., 
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TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)a TIF Cohort 3b

agreement among two or more raters who score approximately the same); (d) A data-management 

system that can link student achievement data to teacher and principal payroll and human resources 

systems; and (e) A plan for ensuring that teachers and principals understand the specific measures 

of teacher and principal effectiveness included in the PBCS, and receive professional development 

that enables them to use data generated by these measures to improve their practice.

Planning Period Requirements. Each grantee that implements a planning period to develop the core 

element or elements it lacks, is— (a) Required to demonstrate in its annual performance report or 

other interim performance report that it has implemented any of the five core elements it had lacked 

at the start of the project; and (b) Prohibited from using TIF program funds to provide incentive 

payments to teachers, principals, and other personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to 

expand the PBCS to additional staff in its schools) until it has implemented a PBCS that, to the 

Secretary’s satisfaction, has all five core elements. 

Professional Development. Each applicant must demonstrate, in its application, that its proposed 

PBCS will include a high-quality professional development component for teachers and principals 

consistent with the definition of the term professional development in section 9101(34) of the ESEA. 

The applicant must demonstrate that its PBCS has a professional development component in place, 

or a specific plan for developing one, that is directly linked to the specific measures of teacher and 

principal effectiveness included in the PBCS. The professional development component of the 

PBCS must— (1) Be based on needs assessed either at the high-need schools participating in the 

applicant’s proposed PBCS or LEA-wide; (2) Be targeted to individual teachers’ and principals’

needs as identified in the evaluation process; (3) Provide— (a) Those teachers and principals in 

participating TIF schools who do not receive differentiated compensation based on effectiveness 

under the PBCS with the tools and skills they need to improve their effectiveness in the classroom or 

school and be able to raise student achievement; and (b) Those teachers and principals who are 

deemed to be effective and who, therefore, receive differentiated compensation under the PBCS, 

with the tools and skills they need to (1) continue effective practices in the classroom or school and 

raise student achievement, and (2) successfully assume additional responsibilities and leadership 

roles; (4) Support teachers and principals to better understand and use the measures of 

effectiveness in the PBCS to improve practice and student achievement; and (5) Include a process 

for regularly assessing the effectiveness of this professional development in improving teacher and 

leadership practice to increase student achievement and making modifications necessary to improve 

its effectiveness.

ADDITIONAL CRITERIA FOR THE EVALUATION COMPETITION: 

Budget Information. In exchange for its agreement to participate in the national TIF Evaluation, a 

successful applicant for the TIF Evaluation competition will receive a minimum of $1 million of 

additional funding over the 5-year grant period (above the amount of funding awarded to it to 

implement the PBCS proposed in its application) for the four pairs of schools selected to participate 

in the evaluation. For each additional pair of schools participating in the evaluation, a successful 

applicant will receive an additional $250,000, up to a maximum total additional award of $2 million. 
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TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)

a TIF Cohort 3b

An applicant for the TIF Evaluation competition must provide, in its application, a proposed budget 

that indicates how it plans to use the additional funds the Department would award. While these 

additional funds must be used for TIF-related activities, examples of acceptable expenses include 

the costs of: (1) Academic coaches such as mathematics and reading coaches, and Master, Mentor, 

or Lead Teacher salaries beyond those the Department will otherwise fund under the Main TIF 

competition. Under the Main TIF competition, the Department approves expenses related to one 

salary, per position, per high-need school within the project scope); (2) Activities such as expenses 

related to release time for teachers to attend professional development beyond those the 

Department will otherwise fund under the Main competition (the Department does not allow for an 

unreasonable amount of substitute teacher salaries to compensate for this release time); (3) Support 

for the PBCS that would otherwise need to be paid with non-TIF funds in order to implement the 

applicant’s plan for fiscal sustainability under absolute priority 2; and (4) Costs associated with 

participating in the national evaluation, such as preparing administrative student records for use by 

the national evaluator.

Incentive Amounts. Consistent with absolute priority 1, an applicant for the TIF Evaluation 

competition must demonstrate, in its application, that it will implement a PBCS that uses—

(1) Incentive payments to principals based on differentiated levels of effectiveness in which— (a) 

The average principal payout (defined as the total amount of principal payments divided by the total 

number of principals in the schools participating in the differentiated effectiveness incentive payment 

component of the PBCS) is substantial (e.g., 5 percent of the average principal salary); (b) The 

criteria for determining whether a principal is eligible for payment are challenging (e.g., payments 

are made to only those who perform significantly better than the current average performance 

among study schools within the LEA), 2 and; (c) There is an expectation of meaningful differences in 

resulting principal pay (e.g., at least some principals could reasonably expect to receive an incentive 

payment of times the average principal payout and the applicant’s documentation of cost projections 

is consistent with this expectation); and (2) Incentive payments to teachers based on differentiated 

levels of effectiveness in which— (a) The average teacher payout (defined as the total amount of 

teacher payments divided by the total number of teachers in the schools participating in the 

differentiated effectiveness incentive payment component of the PBCS) is substantial (e.g., 5 percent of the average teacher salary); (b) The criteria for determining whether a teacher is eligible 

for payment are challenging (e.g., payments are made only to those who perform significantly better 

than the current average performance among study schools within the LEA); and (c) There is an 

expectation of meaningful differences in resulting teacher pay (e.g., at least some teachers could 

reasonably expect to receive an incentive payment of three times the average teacher payout and 

the applicant’s documentation of cost projections is consistent with this expectation).

Implementation of Evaluation. Each applicant under the TIF Evaluation competition must agree, in 

its application, to implement its differentiated effectiveness incentive component of the PBCS and a 

1 percent across-the-board annual bonus in at least one LEA in accordance with the implementation 

plan developed by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) evaluator, Mathematica Policy 

Research. Specifically, the IES evaluator will select by lottery one-half of the evaluation schools 

within the LEA (i.e., ‘‘Group 1’’) to implement the applicant’s proposed differentiated effectiveness 
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TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)

a TIF Cohort 3b

incentive payment component of the PBCS. The other half of the schools within the LEA (i.e., 

‘‘Group 2’’) participating in the evaluation will implement a 1 percent across-the-board annual bonus 

for teachers, principals, and other personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand 

the PBCS to additional staff in its schools). The applicant must identify, in its application, the schools 

that are proposed for participation in the evaluation. In participating LEAs that have the five core 

elements in place at the time of the initial grant award, the first group of schools in that LEA (Group 1 

schools) must begin implementation of all components of the PBCS at the beginning of the 2010–

2011 school year. In a participating LEA that does not yet have in place the five core elements 

necessary to implement a successful PBCS at the time of award, the first group of schools in that 

LEA (Group 1 schools) must begin implementation of all components of the PBCS no later than the 

2011–2012 school year.

Commitment to Evaluation. An applicant for the TIF Evaluation competition must demonstrate, in its 

application, that each participating LEA and school is willing to participate in the TIF Evaluation. 

Documentation demonstrating this commitment must include, for each participating LEA— (1) A 

letter from the LEA superintendent and the principals of the participating schools stating that those 

officials agree to meet the TIF Evaluation competition requirements, including adhering to the 

implementation plan of the IES evaluator, which involves selection through a lottery of those schools 

to implement the differentiated effectiveness component among the schools participating in the 

evaluation. (2) A letter from the research office or research board of the participating LEA that 

expresses an agreement to comply with the TIF Evaluation requirements (if the LEA requires such 

research office approval). 

Implementation of All Non-differentiated Effectiveness Incentive Components. Each applicant must 

agree, in its application, to implement the non-differentiated effectiveness incentive components of 

its PBCS (e.g., bonuses for leadership or additional responsibilities and professional development 

activities) in all of the LEA’s participating schools (those in Groups 1 and 2) starting at the same time 

as the differentiated effectiveness incentive component of its PBCS is implemented in the Group 1 

schools. The schools in Group 2 must not implement the differentiated effectiveness incentive 

component of its PBCS for the duration of the TIF grant.

Scope of Schools. An applicant for the TIF Evaluation competition must demonstrate, in its 

application that it will implement a PBCS in eight or more high-need schools in an LEA that has 

students in tested subjects or grades (i.e., students in grades three through eight). At least two of 

the schools proposed to participate in the TIF Evaluation must be from within the same grade 

configuration (i.e., if elementary schools are proposed there are at least two elementary schools 

among the minimum of eight schools all within the same LEA; if middle schools are proposed there 

are at least two middle schools among the minimum of eight schools all within the same LEA). 

Applicants that include multiple LEAs must meet the scope-of-schools requirement in at least one 

LEA. In addition, no LEA will have more than 16 high-need schools selected for the TIF Evaluation. 

An applicant that is a consortium of small LEAs or an intermediary unit that is considered an LEA 

under State law does not have to have eight eligible schools in a participating LEA provided that the 

consortium or intermediary unit serves a coordinating function (i.e., data are available from a 
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TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)a TIF Cohort 3b

centralized or coordinating entity). In this case, the minimum number of schools required for the 

consortium or intermediary unit is still eight, and within the eight, each school is at least paired with 

another school at the same grade level and within the same State. The Department will use the 

number of eligible schools, up to 16 per LEA, that a successful applicant makes available for the TIF 

Evaluation.

Eligibility Eligible Applicants: LEAs, including charter schools that are LEAs 

in their State; SEAs; or partnerships of (a) an LEA, an SEA, or

both, and (b) at least one nonprofit organization.

Eligible Applicants: Eligible entities for these funds are: (a) State education agencies (SEAs), (b) 

Local educational agencies (LEAs), including charter schools that are LEAs, Or (c) Partnerships of—

(1) An SEA, LEA, or both; and (2) At least one nonprofit organization. 

Additional Eligibility Requirement. Each applicant that currently participates in a TIF project must 

confirm in its application either that— (a) Its proposed PBCS would be available to educators in 

high-need schools in which the LEA does not currently make a TIF-supported PBCS available; or (b) 

If the applicant’s current TIF project serves only principals or only teachers, its proposed project 

would add teachers or principals, respectively, who work in high-need schools and who are not 

eligible for performance-based compensation under the applicant’s current TIF project’s PBCS. If 

awarded a grant, the grantee must maintain its PBCS for teachers and principals in high-need 

schools for the duration of the new TIF project period. An applicant may also propose to have other 

personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional staff in its 

schools) who work in high-need schools benefit from the PBCS.

Cost-Sharing Cost-Sharing: The grantee must ensure that, in each applicable 

budget year, an increasing share of funds from sources other than 

this grant will be used to pay for earned differential compensation 

costs as they are phased in during the performance period. In the 

final year of the performance period, the grantee must ensure that 

at least 75 percent of the differentiated compensation costs are not 

paid from this grant.

See Absolute Priority 2 Above.

Key Definitions A high-need school means a school with more than 30 percent of 

its enrollment from low-income families, based on eligibility for free 

and reduced price lunch subsidies or other poverty measures that 

the State permits the LEAs to use. A middle or high school may be 

determined to meet this definition on the basis of poverty data from 

feeder elementary schools.

High-need school means a school with 50 percent or more of its enrollment from low-income 

families, based on eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch subsidies under the Richard B. Russell 

National School Lunch Act, or other poverty measures that LEAs use (see section 1113(a)(5) of the 

ESEA (20 U.S.C. 6313(a)(5)). For middle and high schools, eligibility may be calculated on the basis 

of comparable data from feeder schools. Eligibility as a high-need school under this definition is 

determined on the basis of the most currently available data. 

Student achievement means— (a) For tested grades and subjects— (1) A student’s score on the 

State’s assessments under the ESEA; and (2) As appropriate, other measures of student learning, 

such as those described in paragraph (b) of this definition, provided that they are rigorous and 

comparable across schools; and (b) For non-tested grades and subjects, alternative measures of 

student learning and performance, such as student scores on pre-tests and end-of-course tests; 

student performance on English language proficiency assessments; and other measures of student 

achievement that are rigorous and comparable across schools. 

Student growth means the change in student achievement for an individual student between two or 
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TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)a TIF Cohort 3b

more points in time. A State or LEA may also include other measures that are rigorous and 

comparable across schools. 

High-need students means students at risk of educational failure or otherwise in need of special 

assistance and support, such as students who are living in poverty, who attend high-minority 

schools, who are far below grade level, who have left school before receiving a regular high-school 

diploma, who are at risk of not graduating with a diploma on time, who are homeless, who are in 

foster care, who have been incarcerated, who have disabilities, or who are English learners. 

Additional responsibilities and leadership roles means additional duties teachers may voluntarily 

accept, such as: (1) Serving as master or mentor teachers who are chosen through a performancebased selection process (including through assessment of their teaching effectiveness and the 

ability to work effectively with other adults and students) and who have responsibilities to share 

effective instructional practices and/or to assess and improve the teaching effectiveness of other 

teachers in the school; (2) roles in induction and mentoring of novice teachers or high-need 

students; (3) tutoring students; or (4) roles in establishing and developing learning communities 

designed to continually improve the capacity of all teachers in a school to advance student learning, 

using a shared set of practices, instructional principles, or teaching strategies.

Selection Criteria (a) Need (5 points). The extent to which the applicant describes the 

scope and size of the project and the need for the project, including 

information on student academic achievement and the quality of 

the teachers and principals in the LEA(s) and high-need schools 

that will be served by the project. 

(b) Project Design (50 points). (1) The extent to which the 

performance-based compensation system will reward teachers and 

principals who raise student academic achievement. (2) The extent 

to which the applicant describes the performance-based teacher 

and principal compensation system that the applicant proposes to 

develop, implement, or expand, including the extent to which the 

applicant will build the capacity of teachers and principals through 

activities such as professional development to raise student 

achievement and to provide students with greater access to 

rigorous coursework. (3) The extent to which the applicant’s 

proposed project includes valid and reliable measures of student 

achievement—including statewide assessment scores as 

appropriate for this purpose—as the primary indicator of teacher 

and principal effectiveness in the proposed performance-based 

compensation system. (4) The extent to which the applicant 

proposes to develop and implement a fair, rigorous and objective 

process to evaluate teacher and principal performance multiple 

times throughout the school year. 

(a) Need for the project (10 points). In determining the need for the proposed project, the Secretary 

will consider the extent to which the applicant establishes that— (1) The high-need schools whose 

educators would be part of the PBCS have difficulty— (i) Recruiting highly qualified or effective 

teachers, particularly in hard-to-staff subjects or specialty areas, such as mathematics, science, 

English language acquisition, and special education; and (ii) Retaining highly qualified or effective 

teachers and principals. (2) Student achievement in each of the schools whose educators would be 

part of the PBCS is lower than in what the applicant determines are comparable schools in the LEA, 

or another LEA in its State, in terms of key factors such as size, grade levels, and poverty levels; 

and (3) A definition of what it considers a ‘‘comparable’’ school for the purposes of paragraph (2) of 

this selection criterion is established.

(b) Project design (60 points). The Secretary will consider the quality of the design of the proposed 

project. In determining the quality of the design of the proposed project, the Secretary will consider 

the extent to which the proposed PBCS— (1) Is part of a proposed LEA or statewide strategy, as 

appropriate, for improving the process by which each participating LEA rewards teachers, principals, 

and other personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional 

staff in its schools) in high-need schools based upon their effectiveness as determined in significant 

part by student growth. With regard to the effectiveness of teachers, principals, and other personnel, 

the Secretary will consider whether— (i) The methodology the LEA or SEA proposes to use in its 

PBCS to determine the effectiveness of a school’s teachers, principals, and other personnel (in 

those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional staff in its schools) 

includes valid and reliable measures of student growth; (ii) The participating LEA would use the 

proposed PBCS to provide performance awards to teachers, principals, and other personnel (in 

those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional staff in its schools) that 
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TIF Cohorts 1 & 2 (Studied in this Report)a TIF Cohort 3b

(c) Adequacy of Resources (20 points). (1) The extent to which the

applicant provides a thorough explanation of how the applicant will 

use funds awarded under the grant together with the required 

matching funds to carry out the program purpose.(2) The extent to 

which the applicant provides a detailed plan, including 

documentation of resources, for sustaining its performance-based 

compensation system after the grant period ends. (3) The extent to 

which the applicant includes a thorough description of its current 

data-management capacity and proposed areas of data 

management development in order to implement a performancebased compensation system in which differentiated compensation 

is based primarily on student academic achievement. 

(d) Quality of the Management Plan and Key Personnel (15 points). 

(1) The adequacy of the management plan to achieve the 

objectives of the proposed project on time and within budget, 

including clearly defined responsibilities, timelines, milestones, and 

processes for continuous improvement to accomplish project tasks. 

(2) The qualifications, including experience, education, and training 

of proposed key personnel. 

(e) Evaluation (10 points). (1) The extent to which the applicant’s 

evaluation plan includes the use of objective measures that are 

clearly related to the goals of the project to raise student 

achievement and increase teacher effectiveness, including the 

extent to which the evaluation will produce quantitative and 

qualitative data. (2) The extent to which the applicant includes 

adequate evaluation procedures for ensuring feedback and 

continuous improvement in the operation of the proposed project. 

(3) The extent to which the applicant commits to participating in a 

rigorous national evaluation that will provide a common design 

methodology, data collection instruments, and performance 

measures for all grantees funded under this competition.

are of sufficient size to affect the behaviors of teacher, principal, and other personnel and their 

decisions as to whether to go to, or remain working in, the high-need school; and (iii) The applicant 

provides a clear explanation of how teachers, principals, and other personnel (in those sites in which 

the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional staff in its schools) are determined to be 

‘‘effective’’ for the purposes of the proposed PBCS. (2) Has the involvement and support of 

teachers, principals, and other personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the 

PBCS to additional staff in its schools), including input from teachers, and principals, and other 

personnel in the schools and LEAs to be served by the grant, and the involvement and support of

unions in participating LEAs where they are the designated exclusive representatives for the 

purpose of collective bargaining that is needed to carry out the grant; (3) Includes rigorous, 

transparent, and fair evaluation systems for teachers and principals that differentiate levels of 

effectiveness using multiple rating categories that take into account data on student growth as a 

significant factor, as well as classroom observations conducted at least twice during the school year; 

(4) Includes a data-management system, consistent with the LEA’s proposed PBCS, that can link 

student achievement data to teacher and principal payroll and human resources systems; and (5) 

Incorporates high-quality professional development activities that increase the capacity of teachers 

and principals to raise student achievement and are directly linked to the specific measures of 

teacher and principal effectiveness included in the PBCS. 

(c) Adequacy of Support for the Proposed Project (25 points). In determining the adequacy of the 

support for the proposed project, the Secretary considers the extent to which— (1) The management 

plan is likely to achieve the objectives of the proposed project on time and within budget, and 

includes clearly defined responsibilities and detailed timelines and milestones for accomplishing 

project tasks; (2) The project director and other key personnel are qualified to carry out their 

responsibilities, and their time commitments are appropriate and adequate to implement the project 

effectively; (3) The applicant will support the proposed project with funds provided under other 

Federal or State programs and local financial or in-kind resources; and (4) The requested grant 

amount and project costs are sufficient to attain project goals and reasonable in relation to the 

objectives and design of the project. 

(d) Quality of Local Evaluation (5 points). In determining the quality of the local project evaluation, 

the Secretary considers the extent to which the applicant’s evaluation plan— (1) Includes the use of 

strong and measurable performance objectives (that are clearly related to the goals of the project) 

for raising student achievement, increasing the effectiveness of teachers, principals, and other 

personnel (in those sites in which the grantee wishes to expand the PBCS to additional staff in its 

schools), and retaining and recruiting effective teachers, principals, and other personnel; (2) Will 

produce evaluation data that are quantitative and qualitative; and (3) Includes adequate evaluation 

procedures for ensuring feedback and continuous improvement in the operation of the proposed 

project. 

Data source for 

this table

“Office of Elementary and Secondary Education; Overview 

Information; Teacher Incentive Fund (Notice Inviting Applications for 

New Awards for Fiscal Year (FY) 2006).” Federal Register 71:83 

(May 1, 2006) pp. 25580 25584.

“Office of Elementary and Secondary Education: Overview Information; Teacher Incentive Fund 

(Notice Inviting Applications for New Awards for Fiscal Year (FY) 2010).” Federal Register 75:98 (May 

21, 2010) pp. 28740 28749.
124
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Appendix F. Glossary of terms

Adequate Yearly Progress 

(AYP)

A federally mandated, but state determined, measure of performance 

generally reported at the school-level. While the details vary by state, 

usually AYP is determined using proficiency rates on statewide 

standardized tests. 

Base salary Salary of teachers or administrators not including benefits or

incentives

Career Ladder A series of hierarchical roles within the teaching profession through 

which teachers can advance by demonstrating effectiveness. Moving 

up a career ladder is generally accompanied by increased 

compensation. 

Charlotte Danielson’s 

Framework for Teaching

A framework describing the key components of teaching that serves as 

the basis for many of the rubrics used in TIF projects. The framework 

divides the practice of teaching into 22 components (and 76 smaller 

elements) clustered into four domains: planning and preparation, 

classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.

Cost-of-Living Allowance 

(COLA)

Adjustment to base salary based on changes in the cost of living 

(usually based on the consumer price index)

Debrief guide Form developed by the research team to synthesize and analyze 

multiple sources of qualitative data (from phone interviews or site 

visits) in one document

Effective Practice Incentive 

Community (EPIC)

New Leaders for New Schools established the Effective Practice 

Incentive Community (EPIC) in 2006 to link principal and teacher 

incentive pay to the wide-scale sharing of effective educational 

practices. 

Extrinsic motivation Motivation coming from a source outside the individual. For example,

motivating someone to perform an action by giving a cash incentive 

based on the completion of that action. 

Growth measure Measures a student’s progress between two points in time without 

controlling for past performance. 

Hard-to-staff school Schools that have struggled to attract and retain quality teachers 

because they are located in poor urban or isolated rural areas, serve a 

high proportion of low-income students, or have a history of high staff 

turnover and low student achievement. 

Hard-to-staff subject Those subjects for which states, districts and schools have had a 

history of difficulty in finding and hiring highly qualified teachers, e.g. 

math, science, and special education. 
126

High-needs schools For purposes of the TIF program, a high-need school refers to a school 

with more than 30 percent of its enrollment from low-income families, 

based on eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch subsidies.

Interrater reliability Degree of agreement in the ratings assigned by two or more 

independent observers of the same event

Intrinsic motivation Motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, 

and exists within the individual rather than coming from external 

sources. 

Master or mentor teacher Typically a high-performing and experienced teacher that provides 

instructional support to other teachers. The most consistent use of 

these terms is seen in schools implementing the Teacher Advancement 

Program (TAP) model. 

Noninstructional staff Staff within a school who do not provide direct instruction to students, 

such as administrative staff, counselors, bus drivers, janitors, etc.

Payouts Financial awards paid to teachers and administrators for performance

Professional learning 

community

Group of educators organized to work collaboratively around issues of 

teaching and learning

Salary schedule, traditional 

salary schedule

Teacher pay based on years of experience and level of education

School-level (schoolwide) 

Awards

An award given to all eligible school staff based on the performance 

of the school as a whole

Status measure Most often the number of students who meet a set performance 

standard (e.g., Percent Proficient). Typically status measures are used 

to compare the performance of different cohorts at the same grade 

level as in comparing the percentage of fifth-grade math students 

meeting a performance standard to the scores of the prior year’s fifthgraders. 

Teacher Advancement 

Program (TAP)

The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) is a comprehensive school 

reform system that provides opportunities for career advancement 

through the following: 

• Multiple career paths (career ladder) 

• Professional growth 

• Instructionally focused accountability 

Competitive compensation for educators

Teacher-level Awards An award given to an individual teacher based on the academic 

performance of that specific teacher’s students.

Tested subjects (also tested 

teacher)

Academic subjects that are typically included in standardized tests, 

i.e., math, science, and English. 
127

Tournament System that calculates awards in a way that either limits the number of 

winners (e.g., paying a performance award only to the top 30 

percentile of teachers) or caps the amount of the total payout at a 

preset amount regardless of how many teachers qualified. 

Value-added measure 

Tournament

Measures changes in student progress over time, while taking past 

performance into consideration. System that calculates awards in a 

way that either limits the number of winners (e.g., paying a 

performance award only to the top 30 percentile of teachers) or caps 

the amount of the total payout at a preset amount regardless of how 

many teachers qualified.

Vanderbilt Assessment of 

Leadership in Education 

(VAL-ED) 

360 degree review for administrators based on surveys completed by 

teachers and the principal’s supervisor that is designed to measure the 

effectiveness of school leadership behaviors. 


The Department of Education’s Mission is to promote 

student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness 

by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access. 

www.ed.gov