Bulletins Live ? Chicago Teacher Incentive Program Boosts Staff ...

By

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

A four-year pilot program in Chicagos Public Schools that focused on increasing teachers access to self-improvement programs was recently evaluated ? and the resulting report found that while teacher retention rates increased, there was little impact on student performance.

The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), funded by federal Teacher Incentive Fund grants and implemented over a four-year period at 40 high need Chicago Public Schools, was evaluated by independent agency Mathematica Policy Research.

Its original purpose was to provide teachers with more mentoring, structured feedback and incentives for self-improvement. Teachers were meant to have more access to leadership positions, and offered financial rewards for improved student performance on standardized tests.

During its test run in Chicago, similar programs were implemented at more than 200 schools across the country, mimicking the Chicago model.

Mathematicas findings suggest the programs expansion may have been premature:

These changes did not?pay off in terms of higher student achievement within the four-year rollout period in Chicago, study author Allison Seifullah writes in her executive summary. This result provides a caution to funders investing in future programs in terms of what to expect over a four-year period. However, designers of new policies might consider how to change selected program elements to produce more favorable outcomes in the future.

The study compounds five years of data collected at 34 public and charter schools that completed the pilot program, and compares their performance in the key areas of test score improvement, achievement gap closure and dropout rate reduction to non-TAP schools. (The data was slightly impacted by closures and consolidations at several participating TAP schools during the four-year period.)

Source: http://www.bulletinslive.com/?p=2249

school delays critics choice awards 2012 honey badger colbert president huntingtons disease rob the firm