Evaluation of key strategies to promote educator effectiveness

Providing educators with performance feedback and offering pay-for-performance bonuses can improve student achievement. This evaluation brief synthesizes two recent National Center for Education Evaluation (NCEE) impact studies, which evaluated key strategies that can be funded through the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants and its successor program, the Teacher and School Leader (TSL) Incentive grants. The key findings are: Providing educators with feedback on their performance for two years improved students' math achievement after the first year by about 4 weeks of learning; the cumulative effect after 2 years was similar but not statistically significant. The effect on reading was positive but not statistically significant. Providing educators with bonuses based on their performance for four years improved students' reading achievement after 1, 2, and 3 years of implementation and students' math achievement after 3 years; the cumulative effect amounted to about 3 to 4 weeks of learning. The two studies provided evidence that on-the-ground implementation may limit the effectiveness of the program strategies, suggesting avenues for improvement. Educators can be receptive to some of the evaluation and compensation strategies supported by TIF and TSL.