Educational Innovation in Teacher Incentive Fund Grants

Project

Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants support the use of performance-based compensation and other human capital strategies that enhance and sustain performance-based compensation, in order to increase students’ access to effective educators in high-need schools, and to expand the array of promising approaches that can help these educators and other personnel succeed.

For the past five years, AIR has been providing technical support to the Center for Educational Innovation (CEI) in New York City. CEI manages four TIF grants, which serve groups of independent charter schools in New York City, Buffalo, and New Jersey. Independent charter schools generally have few infrastructure resources to support their teachers and leaders, so CEI and AIR are helping the charters to design and implement components of a comprehensive human capital management system to stabilize their workforce and their school culture. In particular, AIR is working with CEI and its participating charter schools to:

  • Identify and summarize promising practices that can be adapted as appropriate in the participating charter schools, e.g., for recruiting and hiring staff
  • Redesign their teacher and principal and teacher evaluation systems to provide ongoing feedback to improve instruction and leadership
  • Provide ongoing technical assistance on addressing student growth measurement issues
  • Facilitate the design and implementation of performance-based compensation systems that provide expanded teacher leadership opportunities

Related Work

Image of smiling African American teacher with student
21 Mar 2018
Brief

Promoting Educator Effectiveness: The Effect of Two Key Strategies

Having a more effective teacher or principal can substantially improve students’ academic outcomes. This brief examines the effects of using research-based performance measures to evaluate educators and provide them with feedback, and of offering them bonuses based on their performance ratings.
24 Jun 2017
Brief

Leading on Leadership: A Profile of the New York City Teacher Incentive Fund Grant That Created Teacher Career Pathways

To address the familiar problem of high-need schools with inadequate resources, the New York City Department of Education created a program to allow the most effective teachers to stay in the classroom while taking on leadership roles to help other teachers. This brief quotes extensively from interviews with the teachers involved to describe the program's challenges and successes.
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