Compensation and Collaboration: A Comprehensive Approach to Improving Teaching Effectiveness

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Collective Practice, Quality Teaching: VUE Number 27, Spring 2010

Developing effective teachers requires school-level structures that support and encourage both individual teacher quality and collective teaching quality for the whole school.

L ast year, I left teaching in the public school classroom after twelve years. Not wanting to go into administration, I did not have options to grow professionally, increase responsibilities, receive increased compensation, and continue teaching. Had I been in a system that truly recognized and rewarded teacher excellence, I might still be in the classroom, teaching seventh-grade students and growing with my colleagues.

My experiences are not unique; many other career educators have had similar frustrations. But better alternatives to traditional teacher human capital policies are now available. In this article, I will describe one of them.

After teaching in Illinois for eight years and Tennessee for four years and spending a year at the U.S. Department of Education, I learned that research, teacher intuition, and student intuition do not always align. However, on two foundational issues, they could not be more aligned: teachers matter, and teachers are not interchangeable parts or widgets. Repeatedly, studies have shown that the individual teacher in the classroom is the single greatest school-based influence on student learning (Hanushek 1992; Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain 2005; Sanders & Rivers 1996). The Widget Effect, a report released by the New Teacher Project, affirmed what many teachers, researchers, and policy-makers already knew: we treat teachers as interchangeable parts, scoring them nearly identically on evaluations – even though we know different teachers add different knowledge, skills, and value to a given context (Weisberg et al. 2009).

Nearly all students or former students can point to teachers who positively impacted their learning and life trajectory. Conversely, nearly every student could identify the few teachers who should no longer be teaching or should never have entered the profession. These teachers have lost – or never had – the ability to connect with students in a way that results in positive student outcomes.

We need policy that is aligned with what research, teachers, and students tell us. We must align our education system to best serve the needs of all of our students. To do this, we need to create structures that support and encourage the development of effective teachers. Due to the unique skills, contexts, and needs of teachers, support cannot be at the “macro-teacher” level: the focus must be on the individual teacher.

The Need for a Comprehensive, Differentiated Approach

For too long, both in policy and practice, professional development, evaluation, and compensation have treated teachers as an amorphous entity and applied one-size-fits-all solutions. I experienced this as a middle school science teacher in Tennessee. My district’s central office determined that every teacher in the district needed three years of professional development on differentiated instruction. Ironically, the instruction on differentiated instruction was not differentiated in any way for readiness, expertise, knowledge, or even subjects taught by teachers. For example, middle school science teachers, gym teachers, band directors, and kindergarten teachers all sat in the same sessions. Not only was this ineffective, it also bred cynicism and disillusionment among teachers, who felt that central office administrators were failing to recognize the individual needs of teachers.

In my time at the U.S. Department of Education, I became aware of a comprehensive approach to improving schools based on the idea that effective teachers could be the catalysts for increasing student learning. Time and again, I returned to this model – TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement – as an example of how systems could attain better results for their students. After my time at the Department of Education was over, I began working as a consultant to TAP. The system is designed to attract, retain, and develop teachers and school leaders to increase the effectiveness of instruction and raise student achievement. The TAP system was developed by Lowell Milken and colleagues at the Milken Family Foundation and was first implemented in the 2000-2001 school year. It is now promoted and coordinated by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET). Impact-ing more than 7,500 teachers and 85,000 students across the country, TAP engages schools by supporting teachers both in teams and as individuals.¹

TAP aligns professional development, multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, compensation, and teacher advancement to support student 
learning. This alignment was especially important as states vied for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds from the U.S. Department of Education, as this issue of Voices in Urban Education went to press. In the rush to prepare bids, states were looking to address teacher evaluation and compensation, often in isolation.

Without a comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of the whole teacher that includes evaluation, support, and compensation, well-intentioned policy changes will, at best, lead to 
marginal improvement in student test scores. At worst, they will result in 
unintended consequences such as 
the disillusionment of many effective 
educators and, in turn, decreased student learning.

This article will address two interrelated policy questions:

• 
Should we provide additional compensation to teachers based on the performance of the 
whole school or on the individual teacher’s performance?

• 
Why address compensation, 
professional development, multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, and teacher advancement at the same time?

The first question leads to many other questions and, sometimes, to heated disagreements. How do we determine effectiveness? Who determines effectiveness? Do we measure inputs or outputs? Do we measure teacher and/or student performance? Without addressing each of these individual questions, this article will attempt to use research and practice to inform the discussion.

The second question addresses 
the challenge of how to accomplish lasting and measurable improvement in teacher effectiveness – and the importance of aligning the many structures that support teachers and hold them accountable to the goal of sustained student achievement.

Whole-School and Individual Performance Compensation


Should we provide additional compensation to teachers based on the performance of the whole school or on the individual teacher’s performance?

The answer is, clearly, both. The issue of how we reward teachers for facilitating solid outcomes for students must move beyond the constraints of the traditional salary-schedule-versus-merit-pay debate. The TAP system and districts like Denver and New York City are creatively and collaboratively looking at how to reward and retain the teachers who make the greatest contribution to student learning while also working with less-effective teachers to improve their performance.

TAP bases its performance bonuses on three targeted measures: 50 percent for classroom evaluations, 30 percent for individual class gains, and 20 percent for school-wide gains. The evaluations are based on multiple observations by multiple observers. The gain scores are based on value-added calculations that include individual classrooms and the school. These multiple measures of effectiveness mitigate the potential for capricious individual measures.²

Rethinking Assumptions about Individual Performance Pay
Teachers unions have expressed some support – albeit often lukewarm – for compensation reform in general. But individual performance pay is almost a non-starter in collective bargaining. Opponents cite numerous reasons why individual performance pay is problematic. For example, in a recent Education Week commentary, Kim Marshall (2009) presents a number of these arguments that are based on certain widely held assumptions. For each assumption, I will present a counterargument based on a different set of assumptions and on data from TAP schools.

• 
Assumption: Individual performance pay destroys teamwork.
  There is no evidence that this happens. Data from a 2009 TAP national survey shows that TAP, which includes individual incentives, can enhance collegiality: 94 percent of teachers in TAP schools agreed with statements reporting a high level of collegiality in their schools, with 72 percent strongly agreeing. This reported level of collegiality has grown over the years from already high levels (NIET 2010).

  Economic theory suggests that individual incentives should be combined with group incentives – not replaced entirely by group incentives. A system that recognizes only schoolwide student achievement results fails to provide focus or emphasis on the ways that individual teachers can improve their craft and increase their students’ achievement.

  The 2009 survey in TAP schools showed that incentives, when combined with a comprehensive approach to teaching effectiveness, can improve – rather than hinder – collaboration among teachers and outcomes for students. Teachers in TAP schools expressed overwhelming support for both instructionally focused accountability and performance incentives. That support is growing, with 94 percent of teachers supporting accountability and 
75 percent supporting performance incentives (NIET 2010).

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