Federal Register, Volume 75, Number 98, May 21, 2010, Pages 28463-28750 Page: 28,727
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Federal Register/Vol. 75, No. 98/Friday, May 21, 2010/Rules and Regulations
effectiveness). Finally, one commenter
recommended an independent
validation and peer-review of the IES
evaluation.
Discussion: The Department
recognizes that the challenge of
conducting an evaluation of the TIF
program that uses randomized
controlled methodology to the extent
feasible, as required by the statute, has
created a variety of concerns among
commenters, including the fair
treatment of applicants for both the
Main TIF and TIF Evaluation
competitions, tight timelines and high
non-TIF program costs, and the
difficulty of ensuring adequate
participation by control schools that, by
definition, will not be able to offer
incentive payments to their teachers for
the duration of the grant period. In
response to many of these concerns, and
to ensure high-quality evaluation results
consistent with the statute, the
Department has decided to implement,
as outlined in this final notice, a hybrid
of proposed comparison designs 1 and
2 that would provide a comparison
between PBCSs implementing
differentiated effectiveness incentive
payments and PBCSs providing a small
(i.e., 1 percent) across-the-board bonus
to all teachers and principals. Through
the TIF program, the Department will
pay the full cost of this modest across-
the-board bonus in order to make
participation in the TIF Evaluation
competition more appealing to potential
applicants. This approach will permit a
study design that examines the
effectiveness of substantial
differentiated payments on teacher and
principal performance while keeping
program costs reasonable and providing
a sufficient incentive for participation
by control schools.
The Department does not believe,
however, that additional financial
support for TIF Evaluation grantees is
inconsistent with the statutory authority
for the TIF program, because this
additional funding is essential to ensure
the feasibility of the randomized
controlled methodology specifically
required by the statute. Finally, IES,
which will manage the evaluation
contract, will be guided by the expertise
of an external technical working group
to ensure the integrity and rigor of its
study design, and all IES evaluations are
subject to a rigorous external review
process before the release of any
findings.
Changes: We have revised the study
design in this final notice to include a
comparison of the implementation of
differentiated effectiveness incentive
payments in Group 1 schools with thepayment of annual, 1 percent across-the-
board bonuses in Group 2 schools.
Under the new hybrid comparison
design, the IES evaluator will select, by
lottery, one-half of the evaluation
schools within an LEA to implement the
applicant's proposed differentiated
effectiveness incentive payment
component of the PBCS. The other half
of the schools within the LEA
participating in the evaluation will
implement a 1 percent across-the-board
annual bonus for teachers and
principals, without implementing the
differentiated effectiveness payment
component. Both sets of schools would
implement all of the non-payment
components of the PBCS. Under this
design, both treatment and control
schools will receive additional TIF
funds they may use for bonuses to
attract educators as well as to pay for
PBCS components. The evaluation will
use a random assignment design
consistent with the statute.
Furthermore, we have removed the non-
TIF match requirement that would have
been applicable to proposed comparison
design 2; there is no match requirement
for the new hybrid design.
Comment: Two commenters requested
clarification regarding IES's data
collection plans, as well as when
collected information would be
available to grantees.
Discussion: IES's current data
collection plan is designed to provide
rich information about participating
schools and staff, grant implementation,
and rigorous impact data on educator
recruitment, mobility, and student
achievement. Data instruments will
include grantee surveys and interviews,
teacher and principal surveys, and
student administrative records. IES
expects to provide Evaluation
competition grantees with regular and
continuous evaluation results as they
become available during and beyond the
life of the 5-year grant period.
Changes: None.
Evaluation Models
Comment: A few commenters
expressed a preference for comparison
design 1 in the proposed TIF Evaluation
competition, largely due to the higher
cost of proposed comparison design 2,
which would have required across-the-
board salary increases that could be
difficult to sustain beyond the grant
period. In addition, one commenter
expressed concern about predicting the
required level of the across-the-board
increases in the control schools before
data are available on the actual size of
incentive payments in the treatment
schools.
Discussion: As discussed earlier inthis notice, upon consideration of the
public comments, the Department has
determined that neither proposed
comparison design 1 nor proposed
comparison design 2 is likely to produce
the high-quality evaluation results that
the law anticipates for the required
randomized study. Consequently, the
final TIF Evaluation competition
requirements reflect a hybrid of these
two designs, described elsewhere in this
notice, which will compare the
outcomes obtained by PBCSs
implementing differentiated
effectiveness incentive payments and
PBCSs providing a small (i.e., 1 percent)
across-the-board bonus to all teachers
and principals. In particular, this new
hybrid approach addresses the cost
concerns raised by the commenters
about the need for LEAs to be able to
accurately predict their capacity to
provide across-the-board salary
increases.
Changes: None.
Comment: A number of commenters
cited concerns about the proposed TIF
Evaluation competition requirements,
including the potential for high payouts
(e.g., 15 percent of salary) limiting the
number of applicants that can afford to
participate in the TIF Evaluation
program, uncertainty about defining
"significantly" better performance, and
doubts that two months provides
sufficient advance notice to change
behavior.
Discussion: The Department believes
that the potential for highly effective
teachers and principals to receive
substantially larger incentive rewards is
essential both (1) to producing the
measurable treatment effects required
for meaningful and reliable evaluation
results and (2) to implementing absolute
priority 1. Hence, we envision that TIF
Evaluation grantees and Main TIF
grantees will have comparable
differentiated incentive payment
amounts.
Moreover, certainly not all teachers
who are eligible to participate in the
PBCS will likely earn the additional
compensation. The issue really is the
amount that, on average, an LEA must
set aside for performance-based
compensation per teacher (i.e., higher
incentive payments for the highest-
performing teachers and principals will
be offset by lower or no incentive
payments for modestly performing
teachers and principals), a context that
we believe many if not most LEAs will
find manageable.
With regard to the meaning of
"significantly better" performance, the
Department believes that this definition
will vary from one teacher evaluation
system to another, and that it isappropriate to allow applicants to
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United States. Office of the Federal Register. Federal Register, Volume 75, Number 98, May 21, 2010, Pages 28463-28750, periodical, May 21, 2010; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc52679/m1/273/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.