Nearly ten years ago, Congress established the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). A total $1.8 billion has been disbursed since then by the U.S. Department of Education to districts to accomplish four tasks: overhaul their teacher evaluation systems, create merit pay bonuses based on them, give educators opportunities to take on additional responsibility for more money, and offer professional development to support teachers in their efforts to hit these higher marks.
Under the TIF program, bonuses are supposed to be “substantial, differentiated, challenging to earn, and based solely on educators’ effectiveness.” Since this evaluation shows that 60 percent of teachers received a bonus in a subgroup of districts studied, it’s fair to wonder just how challenging to earn they really were. Moreover, understanding of the program still seems sub-optimal. In the second year of implementation, more teachers understood their eligibility for bonuses and how they were being evaluated than in the first year. “Yet more than one-third [38 percent] of teachers still did not understand they were eligible for a bonus,” the report notes. “And teachers continued to underestimate the potential size of the bonuses, believing that the largest bonuses were only about two-fifths the size of the actual maximum bonuses awarded.”
These disconnects make it hard to know whether or not the program is achieving its main goal of improving student performance, which in any event is rather modest: gains in reading achievement of a single percentile point, and gains in math that were “similar in magnitude but not statistically significant.”
“Full implementation of TIF continues to be a challenge,” the report notes with understatement, “although districts’ implementation from the first to the second year improved somewhat.” While 90 percent of TIF districts were implementing three of the four required components for teachers in year two of the program, only about half were implementing all four. And while the vast majority of participating districts put in place achievement growth measures of effectiveness based on all students in the school, only about two-thirds of districts reported evaluating teachers based on the achievement growth of only the students in their classrooms. Whether this was a deliberate decision or a reflection of the confusion over the program’s aims, it calls into question the entire theory of change underlying the TIF program.
The bottom line is that neither those who favor merit pay nor those who abhor it will find the Mathematica report particularly satisfying. It suggests that merit kinda, sorta might work if teachers understand how it works. The better takeaway might be what’s written between the lines: Want to devise a merit pay program that has a measurable impact on student achievement? Keep it simple, stupid.
SOURCE: Hanley Chiang et al., “Implementation and Impacts of Pay-for-Performance: The 2010 Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) Grantees After Two Years,” Mathematica Policy Research (September 2015).
