1. Socio-Technical Gaps Exposed by
the U.S. Department of
Education’s Teacher Incentive
Fund Grant Program
Christopher Thorn
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

2. Major Federal Reform Policies
• Race to the Top
– State-level grant program to implement teacher and principal
evaluation systems state-wide
• School Improvement Grants
– Grants to employ one of 4 turnaround strategies to chronically
underperforming schools
• Teacher Incentive Fund
– Grants to develop performance based compensation and
improvement systems in high-poverty schools
• NCLB Waivers
– New opt-in state accountability frameworks to move beyond
status-based measures

3. Teacher Incentive Fund
• Began under the George W. Bush administration
as relatively simple pay for performance
program ($100 mil.)
• Round 3 included much more specific system
requirements and professional development
strategies to address adult needs ($400 mil.)
• Round 4 will be awarded this fall and further
expands program as a component of a HCMS
($300 mil.) Also includes $100 mil. for STEM
recruitment

4. TIF Program Core Elements
• Round 3 of the TIF program included a set
of Core Elements that created specific
requirements to address shortcomings
identified in the first two funded rounds
• Of interest here are the IT implications of
these requirements that in many cases
exceeded the existing capabilities of the
grant recipients

5. CE A – Communication Plan
• The requirement to communicate with
participants and the community at large
– Many districts HR offices unused to
communicating outside of traditional
administrative data and to anyone buy
employees
– Program development efforts require more
frequent communication and often included
two-way communication
– Many districts found that they needed to hire
communication consultants to develop plans

6. CE B – Involvement of
Teachers and Principals
• Many larger districts chose to deploy new
communication platforms as part of the
compliance with this requirement.
– Webinars
– Online forums
– FAQ sites
– Formal systems to allow challenges of ratings
– Data dashboards to show progress (or lack of
it)

7. CE C - Rigorous, transparent, and fair
evaluation system
• Development, deployment, and fidelity of
observational rating systems as well as
assessments for measuring student
growth.
– Systems to capture observational ratings
– Systems to check inter-rater reliability
– Systems to calculate growth measures from
state accountability or local assessments
– System to report evaluation results to
supervisors and employees

8. CE D- Data Quality
• All grantees were required to provide data
quality plans
– Demonstrate quality of student-teacher
linkages
– Demonstrate links between evaluation data
and other administrative systems (HR and
Finance)
– This was the single biggest area of technical
challenge (with the possible exception of
calculating VA scores)
– Immature market and organizational capacity
were major barriers at all levels

9. CE E – Link Eval to PD
• This requirement was the first step
towards linking PBCS to HCMS.
– This requirement evolved during the first year
of the project. It was eventually interpreted to
mean that all teachers identified as less than
effective needed differentiated professional
development plans
– Grantees generally struggled to develop
systems to capture, categorize, and allocate
PD

10. TIF Round 4
• Competition closed on July 27, 2012
• Require that TIF project be embedded with
a HCMS – giving grantees 3 years to
implement.
• Created 2 paths for compensation – either
bonuses for performance or pay for taking
on new, roles and duties – eligibility based
on teacher or principal effectiveness
measures

11. Research thin and staff hard to find
• The research base around human capital
systems in education is very shallow
• Not clear that schools know how to hire – what
to look for
• Skills/Organizational gap – HR staff unused to
participating in policies around student
outcomes
• Philanthropic organizations and consulting firms
have substantial leverage over new
infrastructure

12. Incredible changes in the market
• Many states moving to vending core
information services either as a mandate
or opt-in state wide
• HCMS systems developed for other
industries now being reworked and
marketed to education sector
• Major shift in core features of student
information systems to create tighter links
to other systems and improve data quality

13. What’s Next
• 32 states have received approval for
waivers from No Child Left Behind –
attainment based accountability system
tracking major subgroups.
• All of these groups are creating teacher
and principal accountability systems that
include measures of growth in learning
and observational measures of practice.
• We are far beyond what we know works